Brocade Advances Cloud Service Delivery

Enhanced Capabilities for Industry’s First Terabit-Trunk Router Family Enable New Revenue-Generating Cloud Services by Increasing Network Scalability and Agility

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Oct. 12, 2011 – Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD) today announced new features designed to enable service providers to build resilient, cloud-optimized networks and transform their businesses to maximize profitability and infrastructure investment. These enhancements are part of the new Multi-Service IronWare Software Release 5.3 (Brocade® NetIron® 5.3 software release) for the Brocade NetIron family of Internet and metro routers. This family of routers gives service providers a migration path from providing basic connectivity services to delivering high-value cloud services, increasing customer satisfaction and creating new revenue-generating business opportunities.

As service providers look to deliver cloud-based services to their enterprise customers, the network infrastructure has become the critical IT component. As a result, skyrocketing customer bandwidth demands impact both the network and the bottom line. In fact, according to Gartner, the total telecommunications market is expected to grow from $2 trillion in 2010 to exceed $2.4 trillion in 2015. Customers require an unlimited amount of fast, secure, value-added services from anywhere at any time—without prohibitive costs. To meet these demands, service providers need a truly powerful and scalable core-to-edge network infrastructure with the agility to support large-scale multitenant environments, enabling the delivery of differentiated cloud services to an increasingly wider range of customers.

The Brocade NetIron 5.3 software release enhances the value of Brocade router products that already support some of the world’s largest service provider networks. The comprehensive Brocade solution includes industry-leading 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 10 GbE density; advanced IPv4/IPv6 capabilities; high-performance routing table scalability; and MPLS and Carrier Ethernet functionality to help service providers meet their growing business challenges.

Building Resilient Cloud-Optimized Networks

With server virtualization and rich-media content creating the need for more servers to connect through wire-speed connectivity, increased service provider data center network capacity has become crucial for scaling services. The Brocade NetIron family of routers delivers on these requirements with a comprehensive solution that integrates a highly resilient architecture and wire-speed switching/routing with enormous system capacity to collapse network layers.

The newly expanded Multi-Chassis Trunking (MCT) innovation now supports MCT for Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS) in the Brocade NetIron family of routers, simplifying service provider networks and increasing resiliency for customers moving to 10 GbE-enabled servers. VPLS presents an Ethernet interface to customers, simplifying the LAN/WAN boundary between service providers and their customers. This approach enables rapid and flexible service provisioning, because the service bandwidth is not tied to the physical interface. As a result, service providers can simplify VM mobility and enhance network reliability while greatly reducing management complexity.

Delivering Massive Scalability for Service Providers

Service providers are increasingly required to carry private content and services for a growing customer base over virtual local area networks (VLANs). In order to increase headroom to support additional customers while maintaining high service level agreements, service providers require a solution that partitions individual customer traffic. The use of Provider Backbone Bridging (PBB) provides a clear and strong demarcation between the customer and service provider networks at the metro edge—an approach that can simplify the operation of the routers. PBB is designed for Layer 2 metro core and aggregation networks to increase scalability enabling service providers to support over 16 million customers. For customers that want to scale the Internet access, PBB offers a very easy and simple way for them to scale both the number of Media Access Control (MAC) addresses in the network, and also the number of services that they can support in the network.

With the addition of PBB, as part of the Brocade NetIron 5.3 software release, service providers have greater network reliability, improved quality of service (QoS) and far greater scalability in order to deliver additional revenue-generating services with their existing infrastructure.

“Service providers are stressed with competitive pressures and the requirement to deliver more services to their growing customer base,” said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst, ZK Research. “In order to build out a massively scalable, service-rich infrastructure, they require flexible and cost-effective networking solutions with a sophisticated feature set. With the enhanced capabilities delivered in the Brocade NetIron 5.3 software release, service providers can take advantage of their existing infrastructure and expand their performance, scalability and reliability while further simplifying their architecture.”

In addition to PBB and MCT enhancements, other new features help simplify the management of service provider networks. These features reduce management complexity and costs to streamline business operations. Auto-bandwidth Label Switch Path (LSP) allows service providers to dynamically and automatically adjust bandwidth based on traffic patterns, easing the management of cloud-bursting applications. Standard based Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) enables interoperability among multivendor devices, eliminating the barriers to creating a best-in-class solution. LLDP helps reduce operational costs for service providers by greatly simplifying management and network maintenance through management tool consolidation and the automation of diagnostic and other network operations.

“The new Brocade NetIron 5.3 software release delivers on the four value propositions of the Brocade One™ strategy: non-stop networking, investment protection, unmatched simplicity and application optimization,” said Gina Tan, Regional Director, Southeast Asia for Brocade. “Brocade helps service providers transition their metro broadband and core networks to seamlessly meet growing customer demand. Scalable, high-performance Brocade network solutions provide the leading-edge capabilities that help service providers maximize their return on investment as they deliver new revenue-generating cloud services to their customers.”

In order to advance cloud service delivery at the metro edge, the recently announced Brocade 6910 Ethernet Access Switch is now generally available worldwide. This compact Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF)-compliant solution extends wire-speed Ethernet services to the network edge without compromising performance. This design helps service providers expand their cloud-based network services to customers in the “last mile.” Because of its condensed form factor as well as its ability to perform with no fan in extreme temperature ranges, the Brocade 6910 is ideal for space-constrained locations that deliver metro access, mobile backhaul for cellular 4G/LTE, public safety networks and managed customer premises devices for enterprise customers.

Pricing and Availability

The Brocade NetIron 5.3 software release will be available in January 2012, at no additional cost to all Brocade NetIron router family customers with a valid service contract.