Brocade Communications Systems RX Series Advanced Quality of Service, Brocade IronShield Security

•Metro Ring Protocol (MRP):

An alternative to Spanning Tree Protocol, MRP provides sub-second fault detection and failover for Ethernet ring topologies.

MRP works in conjunction with VSRP and 802.3ad based link aggregation to provide bandwidth scalability and SONET- like resilience.

•Virtual Switch Redundancy Protocol (VSRP): Supports sub-second fault detection and fail-over for mesh topologies in which redundant switches provide back-up operation for one another

•Single-instance STP: Provides a single instance of STP to run on all port-based

VLANs within a single device, interoperable with others that are 802.1d compliant

•Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol Based on IEEE 802.1w: Dramatically improves the spanning tree convergence time to sub- second by automatically renegotiating port roles in case of a link failure without relying on timers

•Per VLAN Spanning Tree (PVST): Allows for control of STP on an individual VLAN basis for traffic engineering VLAN traffic

(i.e., load distribution)

•Topology Groups: Dramatically improves

Layer 2 control protocol scalability by allowing a few instances of STP, RSTP, MRP, or VSRP to control large groups of VLANs

•Super Aggregated VLANs (SAVs): Allows transparent tunneling of multiple VLANs through a single backbone VLAN

•PIM and IGMP Snooping: Offers efficient handling of multicast traffic in Layer 2 topologies by identifying ports that request a multicast stream and forwarding the stream only on these ports. This dramatically improves the performance of multicast applications, allowing for many more streams to be transiting the network.

Advanced Quality of Service

•Advanced QoS: Allows administrators to enforce QoS policies based on port, VLAN, source MAC, ACL rules, 802.1p priority,

Type of Service (ToS), DiffServ settings or Rate Limiting status

•Very Low Latency Across all Packet Sizes:

Consistent low latency for strict priority applications such as voice over IP, high performance computing and video over IP

•Configurable Combinations of Queuing

Disciplines and Congestion Control Policies: Combinations of Strict Priority (SP) and Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) provide flexibility for network administrators. In the event of egress port congestion, traffic policies can be configured for tail drop or weighted random early detection

(WRED) operation.

•Advanced Bandwidth Management:

Allows intelligent bandwidth management using hardware based enforcement of Committed Information Rate (CIR) with

Excess Burst control capabilities and seamless integration with other advanced QoS features including priority marking and honoring.

Cohesive, Unified and Easy-to-Use

Network Management

•Centralized Network Management:

Brocade IronView Network Manager is a

Web-based, graphical interface tool that empowers network operators to seamlessly control software and configuration updates

•Command Line Interface (CLI):

Industry-standard configuration interface, consistent and common throughout Brocade products

•Web interface: Provides easy-to-use

Graphical User Interface (GUI) for system configuration from standard Web browsers

•sFlow (RFC 3176): Provides scalable, wire-speed network monitoring and accounting with no impact on network performance

Brocade IronShield Security

•Wire-speed Extended Layer 2, Layer 3 and 4 Access Control Lists (ACL): Control packet forwarding and restricts access to the system management interface, while providing wire-speed switching and routing:

–Extensible ACL Implementation for Layer 3 and 4 Information: Identifies traffic based on source or destination

IP address, IP protocol type, TCP or UDP port, IP precedence or ToS values

–Flexible ACL Implementation for Layer 2 Information: Identifies traffic based on source or destination MAC address, Ethernet type, VLAN-ID values and 802.1p values

–ACL Scalability: Support for up to

8,000 ACLs

–Ease of Administration: Identify an ACL by name or number, or add a comment line for ease of administration

–Secure Shell and Secure Copy:

Provides secure access to the administration and management interface over the network

•Protection Against Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks: Prevents or minimizes network downtime from malicious users by limiting TCP SYN and ICMP traffic and protects against broadcast storms

•User Authentication: Authentication with

AAA, 802.1x, RADIUS, TACACS, and TACACS+ prevents unauthorized network access

•MAC Port Security: Controls the MAC addresses allowed per port

•sFlow (RFC 3176): Provides cost-effective, scalable, wire-speed network monitoring to detect unusual network activity

•SNMPv3: Secured SNMP management with authentication and privacy services

•BGP-Guard:Complements MD5 security for BGP sessions to protect against session disruption by restricting the number of hops the BGP session can traverse