Brocade Expands NFV Product Portfolio with New Brocade Vyatta 5600 vRouter

Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD) is the industry leader in Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) with almost 1.3 million downloads of its products worldwide. Building on this success, the Brocade^® Vyatta^®5600 vRouter is the latest addition to the company’s NFV product portfolio and brings with it an impressive performance boost. As the first virtual router for telco-class networks, the Brocade Vyatta 5600 is up to 40 times faster than competitive virtual routing products^[1].

The latest network-centric x86 servers deliver outstanding packet processing capabilities and are increasingly populated with10GbE Network Interface Cards (NICs)to accommodate data traffic growth. The Brocade Vyatta 5600 enables telcos and large service providers to harness this extremely cost-efficient networking power by leveraging software instead of deploying traditional purpose-built hardware.

What’s New:

• Directly answers the NFV calltoaction of the world’s largest telecommunication and service providers
• Leverages Brocade vPlane^TM technology capable of 10 Gbps throughput per x86 core
• Addresses use cases such as BGP routing, ACL offload and Virtual BGP Route Reflection, among others
• Is currently in limited availability and scheduled for general availability at the end of 2013
• Complements the Brocade Vyatta 5400 vRouter product family, which is designed for Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and is currently deployed by industry leaders such asAmazon, Rackspace and SoftLayer

Quotes

Kelly Herrell, vice president and general manager, Software Networking Business at Brocade

“In proof-of-concept tests with large carriers, we are seeing a CapEx savings potential of 90 percent or more when replacing purpose-built hardware with a high-performance x86 server and the Brocade Vyatta vRouter. This system architecture shift is central to the larger pursuit of NFV architectures where CapEx and OpEx advantages go hand-in-hand with radical improvements in network service agility and time-to-service.”

Duke Skarda, Chief Technology Officer at SoftLayer, an IBM Company

“SoftLayer has a history of deploying a wide range of performance-oriented solutions leveraging commodity hardware. This is essential to SoftLayer’s agility and cost model. The Brocade Vyatta vRouter is a prime example of NFV that is delivered without proprietary network boxes, enabling us to respond to customer demand faster while providing a very flexible and affordable solution.”

Michael Howard, Co-Founder and Principal Analyst, Infonetics

“From our surveys, global service providers believe that NFV represents a fundamental change in telecom network architecture that will deliver benefits in operational efficiency, shorter time to new services and revenue as well as CapEx savings. The Brocade Vyatta 5600vRouter fits the market requirements for a carrier-class virtual router including supported NFV applications and ‘unheard of’ speedy execution on multicore Intel processors. Brocade is out early in a market that will grow over the next decade as part of the carrier SDN-NFV transformation.”

Paul Parker-Johnson, Practice Lead, Cloud Computing and Virtual Infrastructure Technologies, ACG Research

“To date, strong progress has been made on developing platforms that abstract system controls from underlying infrastructures, but limited progress has been made on harnessing dramatic advances in x86 platform performance in handling Layer 3 networking and other challenging functions required for customers to go truly virtual. With the Vyatta 5600, Brocade is making an innovative contribution to the state-of-the-art in network functions virtualization. The 5600’s powerful vPlane architecture allows it to handle tougher network and cloud data center use cases, such as L3 edge routing, BGP route reflection and ACL offload as examples. And the 5600 fully captures the economic benefits of using x86 platforms for networking confirming Brocade’s position as an important innovator and leader in network functions virtualization.”

Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst with ZK Research

“Brocade’s new Vyatta 5600 vRouter offers truly impressive capabilities just as the NFV movement is gaining mainstream momentum. Brocade continues to drive the industry forward with its focus on software networking gained from its acquisition of Vyatta. The Brocade Vyatta 5400 vRouter leads the industry in adoption with cloud service providers as a proven and pragmatic solution, and now the Brocade Vyatta 5600 breaks into a new realm of performance leadership for telco-grade applications.”