Brocade

Whatever Happened to Brocade?

Much like the once-popular mall arcade that practically disappeared from our generational purview overnight, Brocade’s rearrangement two years ago left many of us scratching our heads and wondering: What the heck happened to a lot of their equipment and where do we go now for our needs?

Brocade SAN switches have always used a Ports-on-Demand (POD) licensing model, where ports can be activated by applying a POD license. This model is also used in their IP product line, most prominently in the Brocade ICX and VDX series switches. The concept is simple: all ports are physically present, but not all of them are active, or are not active at 10GbE.

By now you likely have heard of Brocade's MLXe series of modular switches. However, many of our customers already have MLX or XMR deployed and the idea of switching out their existing gear is about as exciting as upgrading to from the iPhone 4 to the 4S (Sorry, Steve Jobs!). Well, what some people don't know is that you can upgrade your existing MLX/XMR using the High speed switch fabric (HSF) upgrade kit.

With rising demands on core infrastructure, the straightforward CAM partitions (that’s Content Addressable Memory for newbs) we used to rely on have become wobbly solutions at best, and head-scratching disasters at worst. As straight IPv4 tables give way to dual stacking with VPN and MPLS provisioning (among other things), the demands on the core have made the static tables of default Foundry Direct Routing (FDR) much less viable. Brocade has been refining its partition profiles for a while, resulting in a granularity that resembles Waikiki Beach.

We are finally starting to see our customers migrate from generation 1 MLX/XMR chassis and line-cards to Brocade's new MLXe converged platform.

Over the past year we've saved a number of mid-sized telecom clients a good deal of their IT budgets by helping them increase port density in existing configurations rather than upgrading to a larger profile chassis. One such card that more than doubles existing port-density is the NI-MLX-1GX48-T-A, a 48-port 10/100/1000Base-T, MRJ21 module that replaces the standard 20-port NI-MLX-1Gx20-GC RJ45 copper cards.

(Author contemplating the possibilities of an RX-32!)

For a long time now, customers have showed interest in the BigIron RX Telco blade, known as RX-BI48T for it's extremely high GbE port density. In only one chassis slot, you can run up to 48-ports of GbE copper. However, because Foundry never shipped these cards with the proprietary MRJ21 cables that are needed to use this card, demand has been relatively soft on the secondary market.

We have a lot of experience with Foundry ServerIron load balancers. So when our customers starting inquiring about their new line of ADX access switches, we wanted to get a better grasp of how a legacy SI350-PLUS stacked up against the new ServerIron ADX line. I got a chance to ask my Brocade SE about some very specific things I had been wanting to know...

Just landed, I have a FCX624S-F-ADV which is a 24x GB SFP fiber switch, with the advanced L3 license which enabled is to run BGP tables. This unit is NEW OPEN BOX and comes with our full ONE-YEAR warranty.

Give me a call with any questions about this or ANY Brocade or legacy Foundry products.

Charles Hurbert
charles(at)terabitsystems(dot)com
415-483-1190 Direct
AIM: chazfilez75