Brocade Unveiled Cloud-Optimized Networking Solutions

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. announced new cloud-optimized networking solutions to enable the next evolution in public cloud infrastructures.

            Brocade 100 GbE Blade

These advancements will help service providers leverage their existing infrastructures to create a broad set of new revenue-generating services, such as virtual private cloud services, for enterprise customers. As a result, service providers around the globe can minimize their infrastructure expenditure and raise their revenue to increase profitability.

At its annual Technology Day Summit, Brocade unveiled the solutions that support the expansion of emerging service provider public cloud infrastructures, including:

• Software advancements to the entire family of Brocade Internet core, metro and edge routing products, including a clear migration path from today’s IPv4-based networks to IPv6
• A new set of carrier-grade 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 100 GbE blades for Brocade MLX Series routers to enable massive scalability for highly virtualized and cloud-based networks
• Enhanced IPv4/IPv6 and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) routing capabilities and scalability for the Brocade NetIron CER 2000 Series compact routers to expand the service provider cloud in metro networks
• The Brocade 6910 Ethernet Access Switch, a new metro network solution designed to cost-effectively deliver advanced services to businesses

Today’s networks must be cloud-optimized at every critical point as they will define the application performance and the customer experience within the cloud. Service providers are able to leverage Brocade data center networking knowledge in high-performance Brocade ServerIron ADX application delivery switches, as well as storage fabric and Ethernet fabric technologies to build out their cloud infrastructure. Specifically, the Brocade Ethernet fabric technology enables a completely virtualized environment in which service providers can offer compute, storage and network resources to their customers on-demand. In addition, Brocade Ethernet fabrics simplify data center network management and operations, improve network efficiency and utilization and thus reduce total cost of ownership.

According to a recent report by Gartner, the global market for cloud services is expected to grow to nearly $150 billion by 2014. This market opportunity is transforming how service providers will deliver information technology services to their customers. It is a catalyst that will alter how services are delivered and consumed by nearly everyone worldwide, driving a shift in business and revenue models.

"Over the past decade, bandwidth and basic connectivity services have been moving rapidly toward commoditization," stated Michael Howard, co-founder and principal analyst, Service Provider and Data Center Networks, Infonetics Research. "At the same time, service providers must make significant investments in their networks just to keep up with escalating bandwidth demand. Adding cloud services enables service providers to offer a variety of additional revenue-generating services while leveraging those network investments. Making the right network investment choice means that necessary infrastructure expenditures can also increase revenue opportunities."

By working with industry consortiums on standards for open network environments, Brocade delivers a standards-based cloud infrastructure. In 2010, Brocade became the first public networking vendor to endorse OpenFlow, an emerging standard for delivering software-defined networking capabilities, and the company is now involved in the OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Storage standards.

Advancing Service Provider Public Clouds
through Hardware and Software Enhancements
Guided by the Brocade One strategy that aligns to customer imperatives, Brocade introduced the following solutions targeted at service provider customers globally:

• Brocade protects existing network infrastructure investments while simplifying operational management with the availability of the two-port 100 GbE and eight-port 10 GbE (8×10G-X) blades for the Brocade MLX Series. These carrier-class blades help reduce operational expenditures and promote service provider expansion. The new 100 GbE blades cost just a fraction of competitive offerings, helping promote mass adoption of high-performance, scalable networking technology. When installed in the Brocade MLXe router, the 100 GbE performance can power a half-million high-definition video streams over a single managed connection. This provides more than twice the operational efficiency of competitors at a fraction of the cost, resulting in massive gains in profitability.

"With nearly 1.3 Tbps of peak traffic, aggregated from 415 member networks, the foundation of our success must be built on high-performance networking with massive scalability and carrier-grade resiliency," said Henk Steenman, chief technology officer for Amsterdam Internet Exchange. "Our network traffic doubles every 18 months as a direct result of the proliferation of Internet-enabled mobile devices and online video consumption, making it vital for our Brocade routing infrastructure to efficiently scale to support ongoing expansion. The new Brocade 100 GbE blades provide us with a simplified path to remain ahead of this bandwidth growth curve by enabling massive network scalability and capacity as we proactively plan for our future."

• Brocade also introduced the Brocade NetIron 5.2 software release with enhanced capabilities to support IPv6 interoperability with IPv4 networks. By providing a secure transition to IPv6, Brocade will help service providers transform their networks toward a more scalable infrastructure for the future. Through this software release, Brocade has expanded its set of dual-protocol networking solutions with embedded support for high-speed routing of IPv6 traffic over an MPLS network. The software release also increases MPLS scalability and features for large networks.
• Brocade also introduced enhanced capabilities for the Brocade NetIron CER 2000 Series of compact 1U routers designed for high-performance Ethernet edge routing and MPLS applications. Newly introduced models of this router provide scalability enhancements to accommodate growth of IPv4 and IPv6 route tables. With its capabilities, the NetIron CER 2000 enables a range of services and applications to help service providers deliver cloud-optimized routing throughout the metro edge. The target applications include provider edge routing, data center border routing and enterprise border routing.
• Finally, the new Brocade 6910 Ethernet Access Switch is a compact MEF compliant solution that extends wire-speed Ethernet services to the network edge without compromising performance. This helps service providers expand their cloud-based network services to customers in the ‘last mile.’ The target applications are metro access for enterprise customers, mobile backhaul for cellular 4G/LTE, public safety networks and managed customer premises devices for enterprise customers.

"For service providers, their network is the cloud. Service providers want to provide network services to their enterprise customers and, on top of that, they want to deliver application-level services from the data center," said Ken Cheng, Vice President, Service Provider Products, Brocade. "Since Brocade has both data center as well as service provider networking expertise, we are uniquely qualified as a strategic partner to help service providers build out their cloud infrastructures and deliver profitable cloud-based services."