Brocade delivers 100th Blade

NEW DELHI, INDIA: From initial customer shipments of 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) in June 2011, Brocade established itself as a leading provider of carrier-grade 100 GbE routing solutions for service providers and enterprises worldwide. By November 2011, Brocade delivered its 100th two-port blade to the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, one of the world’s largest centers for scientific studies, as a critical component to accelerate its research.

Exponential bandwidth growth and the need for faster connectivity has forced network operators to carefully plan for future capacity requirement. This growth affects virtually all networks, including the public Internet where bandwidth is doubling every 18 to 24 months. CERN’s demanding environment exceeds 15 petabytes or 15 million gigabytes of data traffic per year.

To put this number in perspective, 15 petabytes is equivalent to approximately 200 years of continuously running HD-quality video. Similar to other organizations with high volumes of variable traffic flows and continued bandwidth growth requirements in the coming years, it was necessary for CERN to select a cost-effective solution with dense 10 and 100 GbE routing capabilities today as well as the ability to deliver massive scalability for anticipated bandwidth spikes in the future.

Many of the world’s top service providers and premier research institutes have surpassed the performance requirements that 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) can deliver via their high throughput networks and applications. This growing demand and requirement for greater bandwidth is clear, according to estimates by Infonetics Research, between 2010 and 2015, 100 Gigabit port sales are expected to have a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 214 percent compared to 58 percent for 10 Gigabit connectivity.

Service provider and high performance computing (HPC) environments must continually evaluate their networking requirements to manage a surge in Internet traffic due to expanding broadband penetration, bandwidth-intensive multimedia and research applications, and mobile application growth worldwide.

Delivering up to four times the 100 GbE wire-speed density and nine times the system capacity of competing routers, the Brocade MLXe router helps ensure greater simplicity with significantly less infrastructure and operational overhead, by supporting 32 wire-speed 100 GbE ports and a total switching capacity of 15.36 Terabits in a single chassis.