Brocade debuts 100 Gigabit Ethernet Router

These routers are designed to establish industry benchmarks for performance, scalability and investment protection for service provider and data center networks. In addition, Brocade is now offering the industry’s most competitively priced 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) solution to address the exponential traffic surge that carriers are experiencing worldwide.

The new Brocade MLXe router and IEEE standards-based 100 GbE blade deliver on the four value propositions of the Brocade One unified network vision: non-stop networking, investment protection, unmatched simplicity and application optimization. These value propositions align to today’s customer imperatives and help them remain ahead of the innovation curve by providing a clear growth path for next-generation networks.

Extending the company’s proven heritage with more than 9000 carrier and data center routers deployed globally, the new Brocade MLXe routers provide superior 100 GbE price/performance value to help generate greater revenue streams with a future-ready infrastructure. The breakthrough performance levels enable next-generation virtualized data centers to support rising application traffic demands and deliver cloud-based services using less hardware—vastly improving operational efficiency and driving down capital cost.

To protect existing network infrastructure investments, the new Brocade MLXe routers are fully interoperable with and support all existing Brocade MLX and Brocade NetIron XMR blades. This approach provides a clear product evolution for future network expansion. Current Brocade MLX router customers also gain the power and benefits of 100 GbE performance and capacity since the 100 GbE blade integrates with and operates across all Brocade MLX, Brocade MLXe and NetIron XMR routers.

“The new offerings are technological breakthroughs developed to help service provider and data center customers collapse their infrastructure layers, allowing for reduced overhead and massive scalability without compromising performance or efficiency,” said Ken Cheng, vice president, Service Provider Products, Brocade. “They fulfill the promise of the Brocade One vision by helping customers transition seamlessly to a world where information and applications reside anywhere in the cloud.”

Redefining Service Provider Scalability and Economics from Edge to Core

Service providers today must continually evaluate their networking requirements to manage a surge in Internet traffic due to expanding broadband penetration, bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications and mobile application growth worldwide. Delivering four times the 100 GbE wire-speed density and nine times the system capacity of competing routers, the Brocade MLXe 15.36 Terabits per second (Tbps) fabric helps ensure greater simplicity with significantly less infrastructure and operational overhead. In addition, it can also transport dramatically more traffic on a single routing platform.

To help reduce operational expenditures and promote service provider expansion, the new 100 GbE blades cost just a fraction of competitive offerings. When installed in the Brocade MLXe routers, the new 100 GbE blades enable service providers to deploy the industry’s first Terabit-per-second trunk, which utilizes multiple ports in a single logical link for greater bandwidth and reduced management.

This technology supports the streaming of a half-million high-definition video streams over a single managed connection – serving the equivalent of all San Jose, Calif. households – and delivers more than twice the operational efficiency of competitive offerings at a dramatically lower cost. The result is greater profitability gains to help service providers offer ultra-high-performance, yet affordable, broadband connectivity and services for their subscribers.

“Performance, scalability and investment protection are important design attributes of our global network platform,” said Denver Maddux, vice president, Network Engineering, Limelight Networks, Inc. “We see rapid traffic growth due to mobile video and online media downloads, and so, it is important that we can cost-efficiently upgrade our routing platform to support our growth. Routers like the Brocade MLXe and 100 GbE blades provide us with a path to add massive capacity and scalability to our network as we look at our future needs.”

Brocade has also introduced Brocade Network Advisor, the industry’s first comprehensive unified network management solution for Brocade Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), wireless, Ethernet switching, and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks — providing end-to-end network visibility in a single application. This solution enables customers to automatically discover, manage and monitor the full Brocade networking portfolio including IP/MPLS routers, such as the new Brocade MLXe, as well as Ethernet switches, application delivery controllers, wireless LAN, Fibre Channel SAN and FCoE switches. Brocade Network Advisor delivers on the Brocade One vision as the common management platform that brings together all the Brocade networking solutions to maximize end-to-end infrastructure visibility from a single application.

The Brocade MLXe router is available today in 4-, 8-, 16- and 32-slot configurations and has a starting list price of $22,245 USD. The Brocade 100 GbE blade is orderable today with general availability planned for the first half of 2011. The list price for the 100 GbE blade starts at $194,995 USD for two ports of 100 GbE in a single blade.