Today's campus networks are expected to deliver services thought impossible just a few years ago. Video conferencing, real-time collaboration, distance learning, patient monitoring, and financial trading are just a few of the applications that organizations expect to run reliably 24×7 on wired and wireless campus networks. In such environments, any downtime can prove catastrophic, resulting in significant productivity and financial losses.

Brocade campus network infrastructure products offer a comprehensive suite of end-to-end high-availability capabilities. These features are designed to address a broad range of network issues that, if undetected, can result in potential interruption of network connectivity services.

Enterprises can rely on Brocade non-stop networking technology to support today's business-critical enterprise applications.

Network Availability Challenges

Many variables can cause network service interruptions, relatively minor issues can grow into major problems resulting in network availability issues. These problems can be divided into three categories:

1. Device-related issues: These issues affect individual network devices and can range from a power supply or a fan failure, to a software crash or a device that needs to be taken down for maintenance.
2. Network-related issues: These issues affect a group of network devices and can include a physical layer-related issue such as a defective optical link, or a protocol-related problem at Layer 2 or Layer 3, such as an undetected Layer 2 loop or a misconfigured Layer 3 router.
3. Network service-related issues: Even if the network infrastructure is operating normally, other issues can affect availability. For example, the network might be under attack or experiencing a security threat, or it might be saturated due to excessive traffic and poor traffic prioritization.

The Brocade End-to-End Approach to High-Availability Networking

The primary function of a network infrastructure is to deliver connectivity services to applications. However, supporting the level of availability needed by today's enterprise campus applications requires a different approach–one that views the network as a suite of connectivity services, rather than a collection of interconnected devices.

Brocade non-stop networking for campus environments takes an end-to-end approach to network availability, protecting against failures at the device and network levels while helping to ensure the availability of network connectivity services through real-time service-level monitoring and protection against common security threats.

Device-Level High Availability

At the device level, the redundancy of essential components such as power supplies and fan assemblies is essential to address common causes of failure. For a chassis, redundant management modules and fabric modules are also necessary to address common causes of failure. Several features–including advanced protection capabilities within the operating system's robust kernel, fault-tolerant capabilities, and redundant hardware components–protect against faults in individual network nodes, helping to ensure non-stop operation in higher-layer applications.

Network-Level High Availability

Brocade non-stop networking protects against faults in individual network devices as well as network-related faults and protocol-related issues. Protection against faults in the network is accomplished by incorporating redundant links/paths in the network architecture, providing intelligent redundancy of devices across the network, and using appropriate protocols to detect and handle network faults.

Service-Level High Availability

Organizations often overlook network services when evaluating high-availability networking solutions, yet they are key to ensuring the high availability of the network. Addressing device- and network-level high-availability issues is necessary but not sufficient. Other issues can also affect network availability. Most notably, the network might be under attack, or experiencing a security threat, or it might be saturated due to excessive traffic and poor traffic prioritization. Brocade offers network security, network management, and network monitoring solutions that guarantee end-to-end network availability.

• At A Glance

  • Enabling Non-Stop Networking for Stackable Switches with Hitless Failover (824 KB)

  • Enabling Non-Stop Networking with the Brocade FastIron SX Series (1.2 MB)

• Data Sheets

  • Brocade FastIron SX Series (1051 KB)

  • Brocade FCX Series (1.4 MB)

  • Brocade ICX 6430 and 6450 Switches (1.4 MB)

  • Brocade ICX 6610 Switch (1.2 MB)

  • Brocade MLX Series Routers (1001.8 KB)

  • Brocade Mobility 650 Access Point (537.7 KB)

  • Brocade Mobility 6511 Wallplate Access Point (437 KB)

  • Brocade Mobility 7131 Access Point (503.9 KB)

  • Brocade Mobility 7131-GR Access Point (410.6 KB)

  • Brocade Mobility RFS4000 Controller (608.2 KB)

  • Brocade Mobility RFS6000 Controller (530.3 KB)

  • Brocade Mobility RFS7000 Controller (535.6 KB)

• Solution Briefs

  • Brocade and Spectralink: Improving the Responsiveness and Productivity of Mobile Staff throughout Hospitals (1.1 MB)

• Technical Briefs

  • Achieving Superior Resiliency and Fast Convergence with Brocade Metro Ring Protocol (MRP) (640.2 KB)

• White Papers

  • Multi-Chassis Trunking for Resilient and High-Performance Network Architectures (423 KB)

  • Multi-Service IronWare Operating System overview (268.2 KB)