Megaport, an exciting new entrant to Australia’s telecommunications market, is aiming to become a leading provider of network interconnection services across the Asia-Pacific region by leveraging the power of Brocade® MLXe Core Routers. The platform, implemented for Megaport by Brocade partner ASI Solutions, features the first delivery of 100 Gbps network services in the region from Brocade. The solution is based on Brocade 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) cards, which provide the massive routing capacity along with cost-effective support. As a result, Megaport believes it has an opportunity to make waves in the interconnect marketplace and meet the needs of organizations that are generating and consuming ever-increasing amounts of data.
“We want to revolutionize the way communications networks connect,” said Bevan Slattery, Chief Executive Officer, Megaport. “For too long the industry has been dominated by providers that are operating on legacy technology and are often bound by restrictive price models based on limited capacity. Megaport’s offering is based on a massive interconnection fabric designed to allow providers to use a single physical Ethernet interface to seamlessly connect with other parties. We aim to make a significant positive impact towards the operating costs borne by network operators, content hosts and cloud service providers.”
Since its launch in July 2013, Megaport — which currently extends to 18 major data centers in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane — has connected over 700 Gbps in bandwidth as customers embrace its groundbreaking solutions. With strong demand expected to continue, Megaport wants to lead the charge to roll out 100 Gbps network interconnection services across the entire Asia-Pacific region.
“We believe that providing the highest port speeds is critical, which is why the high-performance Brocade MLXe Ethernet platform is a fundamental enabler for our services. Customers should be able to connect at 10 or 100 Gbps and mitigate the need for multiple cross-connects in a single site. We believe the availability of a better network will encourage organizations to roll out new products that take advantage of our cost-effective services,” said Slattery.
Once they are connected to Megaport, customers can use the fabric as a conventional Internet exchange, utilizing the Border Gateway Protocol, or they can establish Virtual Cross Connects with other organizations. In essence these are Layer 2 virtual circuits that can link two or more Megaport interfaces and can be allocated on a dynamic (non-rate-limited) or static (rate-limited) basis.
“We held a competitive tender for the Megaport core platform but, our team having had a strong positive experience with Brocade in the past, we feel its networking technology is the best available, with the greatest future possibilities,” said Slattery.
Each Brocade MLXe-16 chassis provides 7.68 Tbps of switching fabric capacity and can support up to 384 ports of 10 GbE or 16 ports of 100 GbE operating at full-duplex wire-speed. The Brocade platform is designed from the ground up for non-stop networking and programmatic control of the network through software-defined networking (SDN) — a key enabler of Megaport’s dynamic service offering.
“Many organizations have been running 10 Gbps for quite some time to address the interconnection requirements between switches and, more lately, servers,” said Greig Guy, Country Manager Australia and New Zealand for Brocade. “The obvious next step along this path is 100 Gbps to meet the increasing demand for data services. With Megaport publicly stating it is using 100 GbE in its core and providing 100 GbE ports in a very flexible and cost-effective manner, we believe there will be plenty of organizations that will now be influenced to make the leap as well.”
Megaport’s strategy is to drive a step-change in the network interconnection industry by rolling out 100 GbE network technology across Australia before expanding to other locations throughout the Asia-Pacific region, according to Slattery.
