Brocade Advances SDN Leadership With OpenFlow 1.3 Support Across IP Routing and Switching Portfolio

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 3, 2014) - Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced support for OpenFlow 1.3 across its IP portfolio of routing and switching products, extending the company's leadership and evolutionary approach to Software-Defined Networking (SDN). A key component of the company's comprehensive SDN strategy, the expansion of OpenFlow support from the Brocade^® MLXe and CER/CES product families to the Brocade ICX^® and VDX^® switch families enables customers to achieve new agility and programmability across the network -- from the data center to the campus to the wide area network (WAN).

While earlier versions of OpenFlow are widely deployed among Research and Education Networks (RENs) and other early adopters, OpenFlow 1.3 delivers a richer feature set required for commercial and enterprise networks to address complex network behavior and optimize performance for dynamic SDN applications. These features include Quality of Service (QoS), Q-in-Q, Group Tables, Active-Standby Controller, IPv6 and more.

"OpenFlow 1.3 is a milestone release that delivers some of the core functionality today's networking environments demand," said Brad Casemore, research director of Datacenter Networks at IDC. "Brocade's end-to-end support of OpenFlow 1.3, combined with its Hybrid Port Mode functionality, offers an OpenFlow migration path to organizations that will allow them to embrace SDN without affecting their current production traffic."

An early supporter of the protocol, Brocade has shipped more than one million OpenFlow-enabled ports on the company's flagship router, the Brocade MLXe Core Router and its compact carrier Ethernet routers and switches, the Brocade CER and CES products. By expanding support to the company's campus LAN and data center switching portfolios, the Brocade ICX and VDX product families, Brocade is enabling new SDN use cases, such as Real-Time Threat Mitigation and Service Chaining, in order to deliver services and applications faster and more efficiently, while continuing to reduce costs.

"Brocade's commitment to SDN is clear in the significant contributions to the technical leadership of the Open Networking Foundation and OpenFlow," said Curt Beckmann, chair of Forward Abstraction Working Group (FAWG) at ONF and Principal Architect at Brocade. "The real payoff of Brocade's standards work comes as we provide deployable and compelling SDN solutions. Our latest example is the Flow-Aware Real-Time SDN Analytics OpenFlow application, for which Brocade has been named a finalist as part of the Open Networking Summit's SDN Idol competition."