Advanced QoS to Ensure High Availability and Superior Data Traffic Integrity

The FastIron Edge X Series offers superior QoS features enabling network administrators to provide and ensure high-quality services throughout the network from end to end. The FastIron Edge X Series identifies, classifies, re-classifies, polices, and marks traffic prior to delivery based on specific criteria. The criteria types available are port, source/destination Media Access Control (MAC) address, 802.1p priority bit, source/destination IP address, Type of Service (ToS) or Differentiated Services Control Point (DSCP) fields, or the Transmission Control Protocol/User Datagram Protocol (TCP/UDP) port. VoIP handsets or bandwidth-critical application traffic can be classified by network administrators to discriminate among various traffic flows and enforce bandwidth policies on Layer 2 and Layer 3 QoS fields.

Once classified, the traffic is queued and scheduled for delivery—the network administrator has complete control over how the system services the queues. Weighted, adjustable Round Robin (WRR) queuing ensures that all packets can be delivered and lower-priority packets are not starved for bandwidth. Strict Priority (SP) queuing ensures highest-priority traffic always gets serviced first, ahead of all other traffic, while SP combined with WRR guarantees highest-priority traffic delivery and equal servicing of the lower priority queues.

The FastIron Edge X Series is capable of performing rate-limiting, giving a network administrator the granular control needed to regulate bandwidth utilization. On ingress, extended ACLs, in combination with rate limiting traffic policies, can be used to fairly balance, fine-tune, and control bandwidth consumption. On egress, outbound rate limiting can be used to control bandwidth per port and per priority queue. Combined voice, video, and high-speed data services are delivered throughout a unified network without suffering from reduced performance through these enhanced bandwidth utilization features.

High-Performance, High-Availability, and Cost-Effective Metro Access Solution

The Brocade FastIron Edge X Series is installed with IronWare, which includes metro features like Metro Ring Protocol, Virtual Switch Redundancy Protocol, Super Aggregated VLAN, and Protected-Link. The FastIron Edge X Series includes support for jumbo frames up to 9,216 bytes, required by metro providers that offer high-speed and high-value Ethernet services for storage and high-performance networking.

The FastIron Edge X Series is ideal for 1GbE service delivery within a 10GbE metro access infrastructure. The FastIron Edge X Series can be equipped with a 2-port 10GbE module populated with one (1) or two (2) XFP optics capable of reaching distances of up to 40 km, allowing Metro Service Providers to connect various points-of-presence with 10GbE. This solution optimizes the fiber infrastructure usage and allows the delivery of high-speed service offerings, such as remote backup or remote data-center facilities.

Ease of use: Plug and Play

The FastIron Edge X Series supports the IEEE 802.1AB LLDP and ANSI TIA 1057 LLDP-MED standards, enabling organizations to build open, converged, advanced multi-vendor networks. LLDP greatly simplifies and enhances network management, asset management, and network troubleshooting. For example, it enables discovery of accurate physical network topologies, including those that have multiple VLANs where all subnets may not be known. LLDP-MED addresses the unique needs that voice and video demand in a converged network by advertising media and IP telephony specific messages that can be exchanged between the network and the endpoint devices. LLDP-MED provides exceptional interoperability, IP telephony troubleshooting, and automatic deployment of policies, inventory management, and E911 location/emergency call service. These sophisticated features make converged network services easier to install, manage, and upgrade—and they significantly reduce operations costs.

Complete Solution for Multicast and Broadcast Video

The use of video applications in the workplace requires support for scalable multicast services from the edge to the core. IGMP and PIM snooping improves bandwidth utilization in Layer 2 networks by restricting multicast flows to only those switch ports that have multicast receivers. In Layer 3 networks, support for IGMP (v1, v2, and v3), IGMP Proxy, PIM-SM, PIM-SSM, and PIM-DM multicast routing optimizes network utilization and traffic routing for multicast applications.

Service and metro providers that have transit networks and want to offer high-end services such as IPTV or Video-On-Demand services will benefit from the multicast features. Service providers can combine PIM Snooping and Passive Multicast Router Insertion (PMRI), ensuring multicast distribution in an Ethernet-based network or Layer 2 network. The FastIron Edge X Series switches use the PIM Snooping feature to acquire multicast routes, enabling them to intelligently switch multicast traffic rather than blindly broadcasting multicast traffic in the Layer 2 domain.

IronShield™ Security—Complete Network Protection

The FastIron Edge X Series supports configurable levels for user-selectable security such as MAC address lockdown. The network administrator can assign a single MAC address or a group of addresses to an individual port in order to prevent unauthorized users from accessing the network. Using Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) authentication servers, the network manager can enable 802.1x port-based authentication—ensuring that the FastIron Edge X Series first authenticates the user before allowing the port to transmit data onto the network. This also grants users secure mobility, while maintaining the integrity and security of the network against unwarranted breaches.

To protect the network against DoS attacks, the network manager can disable the forwarding of ICMP messages and also enable the option to rate limit ICMP and TCP SYN packets. The FastIron Edge X Series monitors, throttles, and locks out ICMP and TCP SYN traffic both to the management address of the switch and traffic transiting the system. Enabling this feature will secure and protect the network from suffering a user-generated DoS attack or aiding one. To prevent "user identity theft" (spoofing), the FastIron Edge X Series switches support DHCP snooping, Dynamic ARP inspection, and IP source guard. These three features work together to deny spoofing attempts and to defeat man-in-the-middle attacks.

Once the port is operational, the network administrator can use both regular and extended ACLs to control access to and through the network. Network managers can enable control policies that can permit or deny traffic based on a wide variety of identification characteristics, such as source/destination MAC addresses, source/destination IP addresses, and TCP/UDP ports/sockets or well-known port numbers—further protecting and restricting network access from malicious users. The FastIron Edge X Series implements ACL lookups in hardware, therefore security and protection for the network does not adversely affect switching or routing performance. In addition, enhanced spanning tree features such as Root Guard and BPDU Guard prevent rouge hijacking of the spanning tree root and maintain a contention and loop-free environment especially during dynamic network deployments.

sFlow—Always-On Wire-Speed Network Monitoring

All versions of the FastIron Edge X Series support sFlow™, which is a unique solution to simplify network management. Deploying switches in a networking infrastructure increases overall network performance but eliminates the network administrator's ability to receive a total picture of network capacity, bandwidth consumption, utilization, and overall network health. However, sFlow delivers real-time, complete network visibility, enabling network managers to completely manage every network transaction flowing throughout the network. sFlow uses the built-in capability of the FastIron Edge X Series ASICs to collect and aggregate details on traffic flows from Layer 2 through Layer 4 and automatically delivers information to the IronView® Network Management station. IronView Network Management employs a Java-based network configuration and management tool that displays, in graphical detail network and application-level traffic information. With the resulting insight, the network manager can quickly and accurately review overall networking operations, zero in on hot spots, and quickly diagnose and troubleshoot difficulties before they develop into widespread problems. sFlow also automatically delivers accurate SNMP/RMON statistics, reducing the administrative burden normally associated with proactive network management, design, and capacity planning.

Increasing Network Reliability with Load-Balanced and Redundant Power

The FastIron Edge X Series includes internal power redundancy features, which are only available in a modular chassis. Every FastIron Edge X Series ships with a single AC power supply, but by adding an additional AC power supply 1+1 redundancy is achieved. The AC power supplies are hot-swappable and load-sharing, which are critical for delivering power redundancy and deployment flexibility.

Flexible Network Deployment with Extensive 100/1000 Mbps SFP and 10GbE Uplink Options

The Brocade FastIron Edge X Series is ideal for delivering high-density 10/100/1000 Mbps and 10GbE solutions for flexible networks. The FastIron Edge X Series can be ordered (or field-upgraded), with a 1-port or 2-port 10GbE module supporting one (1) or two (2) XFP optics, allowing for a full breadth of networking interconnectivity. With two (2) ports of 10GbE, network managers can easily build redundancy into their campus network and take advantage of low cost XFP optics.

The FastIron Edge X Series comes with 4-port Gigabit Ethernet SFP interfaces supporting a wide range of Gigabit Ethernet transceivers. In addition, the FESX424HF has 20 x 100/1000 Mbps SFP ports supporting Gigabit and Fast Ethernet transceivers. The high-density SFP ports enable network managers to design flexible, cost-effective networks that can grow with the application requirements. Network managers can mix and match various SFP combinations enabling an FESX424HF to offer both short- range "fiber at the desktop", as well as "fiber-to-the-home" connectivity.

The FastIron Edge X Series can be deployed to deliver Gigabit over Copper (GoC) to the desktop, high-density aggregation within the distribution layer, and GoC connectivity for high-performance computing, grid-computing, and network-attached storage. Support for jumbo frames of up to 9,126 bytes ensures faster file transfer between high-end servers within the data center and assists in reducing the server CPU load.

The 10GbE uplinks supported by the FastIron Edge X Series ensure that the data center can be easily connected to other Brocade switches, enabling concurrent support for low-latency applications, such as VoIP, mission-critical applications, and high-volume network traffic situations.

Future-proofing the Network through Deployment of IPv6-Capable Switches

Networks are in the early stages of large-scale IPv6 production deployment, however few innovative IPv6 applications are on the market. Although the success of IPv6 will ultimately depend on the new applications that run over it, a key part of the IPv6 design is the ability to integrate into and coexist with existing IPv4 switches within the network and across networks during the steady migration from IPv4 to IPv6.

The FastIron Edge X Series of IPv6-capable switches, which support the 128-bit addressing format, are introduced with software release 04.0.01, offering an easy migration path by interworking between IPv4 and IPv6 switches with the existing network or across networks. The IPv6-capable FESX delivers a full complement of standards-based, feature-rich switching and IPv4 multiprotocol routing capabilities. The network manager can pick and choose which sites are upgraded with IPv6-capable switches, preparing the network for future IPv6 applications.

The FastIron Edge X Series IPv6-capable switches are designed with high 10/100 port density and Gigabit Ethernet uplinks in a compact form factor. The switches provide enterprise network connectivity, delivering GoC to the desktop, within the enterprise distribution layer, and the data center for high-end servers, cluster computing, and network-attached storage devices.