Brocade Communications Systems manual Bigiron RX Series, Highlights

Data Sheet

Brocade

BIGIRON RX SERIES

HIGH-

PERFORMANCE ETHERNET SWITCHING

Modular Layer 2/3 Ethernet Switches

Highlights

•System redundancy (switch, management and power) across all BigIron RX chassis

•Interchangeable half-height line modules reduce sparing costs and provide cost-effective modular growth

•Compact chassis design supports very high- density single rack configurations—up to 192 wire-speed 10-Gigabit Ethernet and 2,304 wire-speed Gigabit Ethernet in standard

7-foot Telco rack

•Scalable hardware-based IP routing to

512,000 IPv4 routes per line module

•Powerful suite of unicast and multicast IPv4 and IPv6 protocol support

•Advanced virtual output queue (VoQ) design eliminates head of line blocking and provides scalable QoS

•End to End QoS supported with hardware based honoring and marking and congestion management

•High-capacity 80 Gbps cross-module

link aggregation supports high-bandwidth inter-switch trunking

•High-availability design features redundant and hot-pluggable hardware, hitless Layer 2 software upgrades and graceful BGP and

OSPF restart

•Advanced non-blocking Clos fabric features adaptive self-routing with graceful system degradation in the event of two or more module failures

•Embedded sFlow per port supports scalable hardware-based traffic monitoring across all switch ports without impacting performance

The role of data networks in our daily lives continues to expand and grow. Emerging needs such as application convergence, non-stop operation, scalability and IPv6- readiness place new demands on the network. Modern network solutions must be assessed across a wider set of attributes than earlier generation equipment. In particular, the network must be evaluated on merits that include performance, reliability, scalability, quality of service, security and total cost of ownership (TCO).

The Brocade® BigIron® RX Series of Layer 2/3 Ethernet switches excels in all of these areas, enabling network designers to deploy an Ethernet infrastructure that addresses today’s requirements with a scalable architecture designed to support network growth and evolution. The BigIron RX Series incorporates the latest advances in switch architecture, system resilience, quality of service and switch security in a family of modular chassis setting leading industry benchmarks for price-performance, scalability and TCO.

Available in four chassis models, the BigIron RX Series allows network designers to standardize on a single product family for aggregation and backbone switching. In addition to its enterprise role, the BigIron RX Series, with its high-density and compact design, is an ideal IP solution for high- performance computing environments and Internet Exchanges and Internet Service

Providers (IXPs and ISPs) where non- blocking, high-density Ethernet switches are needed.

All four BigIron RX systems are designed for non-stop operation, supporting 1:1 management module redundancy, N+1 switch module redundancy, M+N power module redundancy and N+1 fan redundancy. Additionally, the BigIron RX Series supports hitless Layer 2 software upgrades and graceful restart routing for fast convergence in the event of a management module failure.

At the heart of the BigIron RX architecture is an adaptive self-routing Clos switch fabric with a virtual output queue (VOQ) design. This non-blocking architecture is optimized for maximum throughput and low latency for