Brocade ServerIron ADX Series: 4th Generation Load Balancer for high-end deployments

When Brocade purchased Foundry Networks, they were acquiring a line of IP switching, routing and load balancing products that they did not already have in their own SAN centric product lines.  Routing is covered by the Brocade NetIron MLXe/XMR/CER line, Switching by FastIron FCX/ICX/SuperX, and Load balancing by the ServerIron ADX 1000/4000/8000/10000. Foundry had a significant track record developing load balancers, dating way back to 1998. All that experience was leveraged into the new Brocade ServerIron ADX line that represents the 4^th generation load balancer offering for Brocade.

At the lower and mid-range you find vendors like Barracuda, Kemp, Coyote Point and A10, who are all relatively new to this once lucrative niche. At the top you find F5, Netscaler, and Brocade­ -- ignoring the Cisco ACE as it’s limited to Cisco shops and has nominal market share. The Brocade ADX is definitely a platform worth considering for higher-end deployments.  

• Best in class Cost/Gig L7 Throughput and Cost/L4 Transaction (VS Citrix and F5)
• From 1-32 application cores (ADX 1001 to ADX 10,000 w/4ASM8)
• Connections per Second (CPS): 93,750 (ADX 1001) to 3,000,000 (ADX 10,000 w/4ASM8)
• Transactions per second (TPS): 625,000 to 20,000,000
• Application throughput: 2Gbps to 70Gbps
• DNS queries/sec (stateful): 106,250 to 3,000,000
• DNS queries/sec (stateless): 562,500 to 18,000,000
• Maximum SSL CPS (1024-bit key): 1625 to 50,000
• Packet-switching latency: 20 microseconds
• Maximum number of VIPs: 32 to 4096
• Maximum real servers: 256 to 16,384
• Layer 4/Layer 7 Load Balancing Support: TCP, UDP, HTTP/HTTPS, SSL, FTP, TFTP, SMTP, IMAP4, POP3, LDAP, DNS, WTS, SIP, NNTP, RADIUS, MMS, RTSP
• Application Health Monitoring: Layer 2 ARP; Layer 3 PING; Layer 4 checks for TCP and UDP ports; Layer 7 checks for applications that include DNS, RADIUS, HTTP, SSL, LDAP, LDAPS, MMS, RTSP, SMTP, TELNET, FTP, NNTP, IMAP4, PNM, POP3, SIP
• Layer 2/Layer 3 Capabilities and Advanced Layer 3 Routing: 802.1d Spanning Tree Protocol, 802.1w Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol, 802.3ad Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), VLANs, and 802.1q VLAN Tagging / VRRP, VRRP-E, static routing, RIPv2, OSPFv2, OSPFv3, IS-IS, Multiprotocol BGP

The Brocade ADX platform is scalable, modular, and has behind it a legacy of over 15 years of load balancing development.  It’s a mature platform from a top-tier hardware provider. More details of course at the Brocade ADX page. Take a look, and contact us for a quote!