Brocade Automates And Simplifies Campus Networks With HyperEdge Architecture

To provide the agile, application and services-centric campus network organisations need today, Brocade has delivered the Brocade HyperEdge Architecture, an evolutionary approach to campus network design. By automating and simplifying the campus network, and creating a holistic wired and wireless infrastructure, the Brocade HyperEdge Architecture enables organisations to harness the productivity gains and competitive edge that mobility, cloud-enabled services and new applications can offer.

Brocade also announced the general availability of the Brocade HyperEdge features announced in 2012, including Distributed Services and Consolidated Management, along with additions and enhancements to the Brocade wired and wireless campus product portfolio. The new HyperEdge features include Centralised Access Point (AP) management, Distributed AP Forwarding, Self-healing Brocade Mobility APs and Active-Active links within individual and scaled HyperEdge Domains.

A cornerstone of The Effortless Network vision, the Brocade HyperEdge Architecture provides unmatched levels of network agility and automation. It delivers a campus environment that can quickly and easily scale and respond to the demands of increased user mobility, while delivering instant access to services and applications.

The advanced features and services of premium campus switches are extended to entry-level switches within a single HyperEdge Domain, delivering intelligence to all user and device ports at a vastly reduced cost per port. Premium Brocade ICX campus switches can be added to existing Brocade ICX stacks in a HyperEdge Domain at any time to upgrade the service level of network infrastructure, providing unmatched investment protection.

As a single logical unit comprised of multiple devices within each HyperEdge Domain, configuration network management and maintenance updates become faster and simpler through dynamic sharing of software images and network policies with fewer management touch points. The wired Brocade ICX infrastructure supports powerful collapsed aggregation and access domains, and the Brocade Mobility products allow centralised wireless APs or controller-based management options.

Mobile traffic is secured and directed at the network edge, not tunnelled back to a central controller, thereby preventing controller bottlenecks to deliver higher performance and reliability along with seamless mobile connectivity. Moreover, the self-healing capabilities of Brocade Mobility APs help ensure non-stop high-performance connectivity.

The Brocade HyperEdge Architecture integrates the access and aggregation campus network layers to simplify services deployment and increase performance. Intelligent wireless APs attach directly to the wired edge domains to provide secure wireless connectivity without overloading the wired infrastructure. All traffic is managed within the HyperEdge Domain, thus eliminating the need for complex legacy protocols such as Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) and controller-centric tunneled wireless traffic. HyperEdge Domains can be scaled together and seamlessly integrate with a legacy campus network infrastructure. This design approach enables simplified device management, while providing an agile, application and services delivery-optimised infrastructure.

In addition Brocade Network Advisor centralises management of the entire family of Brocade wired and wireless products by providing a unified management interface, including support for wireless APs and controllers. Organisations can use the CLI Manager and policy monitoring features across wired and wireless networks to check end-to-end VLAN consistency and to gain other insights. In addition, there are new software enhancements to Brocade Network Advisor, including a new, customisable performance dashboard. Administrators can choose out-of-box views or customise views to display all critical information in one screen, simplifying management and enabling proactive monitoring and troubleshooting.