Networking giant Brocade has announced the SLX 9850, a data center router designed to deal with the massive predicted growth of network traffic.

The firm says that the new hardware provides the density, scale and performance needed for 10/40/100 GbE data center use cases, with a 230Tbps non-blocking chassis fabric capacity that has has fifteen times the total capacity of the previous Brocade MLXe box.

Brocade SLX 9850
– Brocade

Future proof

“Customers tell us that they need networking solutions that not only address their immediate requirements, but that will sustain the next several generations of port speeds and densities, while delivering advanced capabilities to help deeply analyze network traffic as well as automate network operations,” Jason Nolet, SVP of Switching, Routing and Analytics Products Group at Brocade said.

“The Brocade SLX 9850 routing solution was designed to address these needs with an innovative, extensible architecture providing organizations with maximum platform longevity, combined with advancements to deliver unparalleled network visibility and automation.”

Daniel Williams, Brocade’s principal director of product marketing for data center routing, told Network World: “With bandwidth demands exploding from the digital transformation of organizations as they leverage IoT, Mobile, Video, Cloud and Big Data technologies, the ability to cost-effectively scale network capacity – in terms of bandwidth, devices and policies is foundational.

“Key to any routing solution for this digital era is a platform designed to support new customer requirements without a rip-and-replace as networking silicon capabilities advance,”

Brocade said that key features include the Brocade SLX Insight Architecture, which embeds network visibility on every router, and comes with an open kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) environment to run third-party and customer-specific applications; and the Brocade Workflow Composer server-based network automation platform which automates the “entire network lifecycle.”

Henk Steenman, CTO at AMS-IX said: “We evaluated multiple vendors for the new AMS-IX exchange platform, with the Brocade SLX 9850 proving to be the best. With Brocade, we can significantly increase the number and density of 100 GbE services in a cost, space and power-efficient footprint while gaining significant headroom to grow the platform well into the future.”

The SLX 9850 supports up to four million routes, two million full-color statistics and two million policies, and launches in the fourth quarter of this year.