APEXnetworks Standardizes Service Platform With Brocade CER and ICX Switch Families - Seite 2

"Making the decision to implement Brocade was important for us and, so far, everything has gone well, with a smooth transition from our existing vendor. We're very comfortable with the new platform and have been able to tool up our staff, software and management system with Brocade technology and solutions."

The heart of the Brocade solution is the Brocade ICX 6610 Switch, which delivers the performance and availability of a chassis-based switch in a stackable form factor -- and the economics and flexibility to go with it. Each switch delivers wire-speed, non-blocking performance across 48 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports and eight 10 GbE ports to support latency-sensitive applications, with plenty of capacity for high-speed connectivity to APEXnetworks' core layer.

The design of the Brocade ICX 6610 enables APEXnetworks' to increase ports and capacity within its distribution layer simply by adding another switch to the stack. Each switch has four full-duplex 40 Gbps stacking ports that provide a total 320 Gbps of backplane stacking bandwidth with full redundancy -- eliminating inter-switch bottlenecks. In addition to stack-level high availability, the Brocade ICX 6610 includes system-level high-availability features, such as dual hot-swappable, load-sharing, and redundant power supplies.

"The Australian service provider market is extremely competitive and, in order to be successful, ISPs need to deliver virtually limitless amounts of bandwidth while maintaining 100 percent service availability," said Greig Guy, Country Manager Australia and New Zealand for Brocade. "In this high-stakes connectivity environment, the Brocade carrier-grade Ethernet solutions provide APEXnetworks with greater scalability, higher performance and continuous operations -- while also lowering costs through operational efficiency."

In addition to deploying Brocade ICX 6610 Switches in the distribution layer, APEXnetworks is leveraging Brocade ICX 6450 Switches and Brocade 6910 Ethernet Access Switches at customer sites, enabling it to provision both simple and complex customers with the same platform. "We have an upgrade path and, if we are replacing equipment, we know it has the same management interface," said Crouch.

Commonality across the Brocade ICX family also includes embedded support for sFlow, a standards-based network export protocol that supports APEXnetworks' objective of providing customers with up to the minute information regarding their various services, via its custom-built network management system. By embedding sFlow, Brocade delivers "always-on" monitoring without impacting network performance, dramatically reducing implementation costs compared to traditional network monitoring solutions, and giving APEXnetworks the ability to monitor every port of its Ethernet network.