Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) recently announced the Brocade^® SLX™ 9850, a next-generation data center routing solution designed to support the exponential growth in network traffic and deliver the advanced functionality that organizations require as they accelerate their digital transformation.  The extensible SLX 9850 provides industry-leading density, scale and performance for 10/40/100GbE data center use cases.

Leveraging a unique combination of hardware and software innovations, the SLX 9850 router includes the embedded Brocade SLX Insight Architecture™ that delivers pervasive network visibility for unparalleled insight to meet increasingly stringent service levels. The SLX 9850 also takes advantage of Brocade Workflow Composer™ to provide server-based, DevOps-style network automation that integrates across IT domains for end-to-end workflow automation.

Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30 percent from 2015, and will reach 20.8 billion by 2020.   In 2021, video will account for about 70 percent of mobile data traffic. With cloud services, video streaming, Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile connectivity growing at exponential rates, organizations must ensure that the infrastructure they deploy today can support dramatic future traffic growth.  At the same time, as network operational complexity continues to grow, improved visibility and automation are becoming essential to achieving business agility.

“Customers tell us that they need networking solutions that not only address their immediate requirements, but that will sustain the next several generations of port speeds and densities, while delivering advanced capabilities to help deeply analyze network traffic as well as automate network operations,” said Jason Nolet, senior vice president, Switching, Routing and Analytics Products Group, Brocade.  “The Brocade SLX 9850 routing solution was designed to address these needs with an innovative, extensible architecture providing organizations with maximum platform longevity, combined with advancements to deliver unparalleled network visibility and automation.”

Key Benefits of the Brocade SLX 9850 Routing Solution

• Pervasive network visibility.  The Brocade SLX Insight Architecture provides a new approach to network monitoring and troubleshooting, making it faster, easier and more cost-effective to obtain comprehensive, real-time visibility that is required for network operations and automation.  By embedding network visibility on every router, organizations can achieve pervasive visibility throughout the network to quickly identify problems, accelerate mean-time-to-remediation and improve overall service levels.

The Brocade SLX Insight Architecture includes an open kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) environment to run third-party and customer-specific monitoring, troubleshooting and analytics applications.  It also provides a dedicated 10 GbE analytics path between the packet processor on each SLX 9850 interface module and the KVM environment on the management modules.  This allows applications running in the KVM environment to extract data via an internal, isolated link, without disrupting forwarding or control plane traffic.  To deliver the captured data to analytics applications off the platform, the SLX Insight Architecture provides flexible streaming options, including a dedicated 10 GbE services port on each management module for out-of-band streaming as well as streaming via any interface module port.

• Dev-Ops style network automation.  The Brocade Workflow Composer server-based network automation platform helps organizations improve business agility and accelerate innovation by automating the entire network lifecycle—from initial provisioning and validation to troubleshooting and remediation of multivendor networks.  Powered by the StackStorm open source project, Workflow Composer also automates workflows across multiple IT domains within the services delivery chain—such as network, compute, storage and applications—to bridge organizational silos within the data center.  Brocade Workflow Composer now supports the SLX 9850 and provides turnkey, customizable and do-it-yourself network workflows enabling customers to embrace automation at their own pace.

• Future-ready routing platform.  The Brocade SLX 9850 delivers 230 Tbps non-blocking chassis fabric capacity providing industry-leading 10/40/100 GbE price and port density per blade.  With a unique 1.5 RU modular line card designed for the highest density and scale, the SLX 9850 can support up to four million routes, two million full-color statistics and two million policies to address the exponential growth of network bandwidth, devices and services today and in the future.

Supporting Quotes

• “There’s no question that proliferating mobility, the growth of IoT, and increased video traffic strain the bandwidth limits of existing datacenter and WAN networks. When one also considers the lack of real-time visibility and automation, the network becomes a significant inhibitor to business agility.  Embedded functionality such as the Brocade SLX Insight Architecture allows customers to tune their visibility requirements across all routers in the network based on the needs of the business.  This approach will help streamline operations without impacting performance.” – Brad Casemore, research director, Data Center Networks, IDC
• “At AMS-IX (Amsterdam Internet Exchange), we need to support our customers with ever increasing capacity, especially for 100 GbE access links, at lower price points while at the same time rapidly turning up these services.  We evaluated multiple vendors for the new AMS-IX exchange platform, with the Brocade SLX 9850 proving to be the best.  With Brocade, we can significantly increase the number and density of 100 GbE services in a cost, space and power-efficient footprint while gaining significant headroom to grow the platform well into the future.” – Henk Steenman, chief technology officer, AMS-IX