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Network vendor Brocade on Wednesday unveiled a new high-density router for service providers and data centers, as well as a new 100GbE blade. 
 
The MLXe core router is the latest in Brocade’s MLX series of high-density routers. An MLXe unit outfitted with the new 100GbE blades can provide a terabit-per-second trunk for service providers, which Brocade claims is an industry first. The blade is based on IEEE standards.
 
Ken Cheng, VP of service provider products at Brocade, said the new offerings served to further the company’s Brocade One vision, which is to have information and applications reside anywhere in the cloud. "The new offerings are technological breakthroughs developed to help service provider and data center customers collapse their infrastructure layers, allowing for reduced overhead and massive scalability without compromising performance or efficiency," he said in a statement. 
 
Brocade’s value proposition for the new products is non-stop networking, investment protection, simplicity and application optimization. The company says the solutions enable virtualized data centers to support rising application traffic demands and work well within systems built to provide cloud-based service delivery.
 
Investment protection is ensured by making the new router interoperable with existing Brocade MLX and NetIron XMR blades and the new blade integrates with all Brocade MLX, MLXe and NetIron XMR routers. 
 
The MLXe is available now in four- , eight- , 16- and 32-slot configurations and starts at $22,245. While customers can order the new 100GbE blade today, it is slated for general availability in the first half of 2011 at list staring price of about $195,000 for two 100GbE ports in one blade. 
 
Brocade also unveiled a new SAN and IP control product called Brocade Network Advisor. This is a unified-network-management solution for Brocade Fibre Channel, FCoE, wireless, Ethernet switching and MPLS networks. It enables automatic discovery, management and monitoring of the full Brocade networking portfolio, including IP/MPLS routers and Ethernet switches, application delivery controllers, wireless LAN, Fibre Channel SAN and FCoE switches.