The new Brocade MLXe Core Router has been unleashed as part of the Brocade MLX Series of high-density routers. These routers are designed to establish industry benchmarks for performance, scalability and investment protection for service provider and data centre 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.

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 centre 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.”

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.

“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.”

With server virtualisation and rich-media content triggering the need for more servers to connect through wire-speed connectivity, increased data centre network capacity has become crucial for scaling services. In addition, data centre deployments are requiring highly scalable performance attributes and simplified design characteristics.

The Brocade MLXe router delivers on these requirements with a comprehensive solution that integrates high-performance wire-speed switching/routing with enormous system capacity to collapse network layers. Its 4.8 billion packets per second performance provides five times the IPv6 forwarding capacity compared to competing offerings. This exceptional performance helps data centres support more network traffic using far less infrastructure – with the added benefit of long-term investment protection.

Non-stop networking with reduced architecture complexity is also a fundamental requirement for next-generation data centres. The Brocade MLXe router and newly introduced Multi-Chassis Trunk (MCT) innovation simplify data centre networks and increase resiliency for customers moving to 10 GbE-enabled servers. This advancement enables network-level virtualisation and enhanced network reliability while greatly reducing management complexity.