Brocade Communications Systems ADX 1000, ADX 4000, ADX 10000, SERVERIRON ADX 1000, SERVERIRON ADX 4000 Description
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FAQ
BROCADE SERVERIRON
ADX 1000, 4000, & 10000 SERIES
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Overview
Brocade® ServerIron® intelligent application delivery and traffic management solutions have
led the industry for over a decade, helping to mitigate costs and prevent losses by optimizing
business-critical enterprise and service provider applications with high availability, security,
multisite redundancy, acceleration, and scalability—in more than 3000 of the world’s most
demanding organizations.
The latest generation of ServerIron Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) was designed to
meet growing demand for application connectivity, virtualization, and operating efficiency.
These new solutions include:
• ServerIron ADX 1000 Series Switches
• ServerIron ADX 4000 Series Switches
• ServerIron ADX 10000 Series Switches
General Questions and Answers
Q What are the Brocade ServerIron ADX 1000, 4000, and 10000 products?
Q A flagship platform for application-enabled networking, the ServerIron ADX 1000, 4000,
and 10000 represent a new class of data center-hardened Layer 4-7 Application Delivery
Controller for application performance monitoring, acceleration, and optimization in both
physical and virtual server environments. These products improve the user application
experience and offload servers to ensure higher availability and security at extreme data
rates, while lowering Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). They provide breakthrough
performance, a highly robust services platform, built-in extensibility, and seamless
interoperability across fabrics and networking protocols, stanchly supporting the most
mission-critical business applications.
The ServerIron ADX brings capacity on demand with both modular and fixedconfiguration platforms and enables growth in performance, interface density and
feature flexibility with growth in the business. With over 70 Gbps of Layer 4 and Layer 7
throughput, ADX leads the way in overall performance and price-performance, defending
application servers against up to 120 million Denial of Service attacks per second and
combating transaction revenue losses and security breaches with SSL performance
approaching 230,000 transactions per second. The ServerIron ADX ensures the greatest
application fluency and optimization with validated designs, completely customizable
application handling, backed up with an online community to engender collaborative
application delivery solutions.
The ServerIron ADX product family includes:
• Brocade ServerIron ADX 1000: This 1U ADC can be ordered in numerous
configurations ranging from the entry-level ADX 1008-1 with eight 10/100/1000
BASE–T ports, one application processor, and one AC or DC power supply, all the way
up to the ADX 1216-4, with 16 10/100/1000 BASE–T ports, two 10 GbE XFP ports,
four application processors, as well as SSL acceleration hardware, and GSLB (Global
Server Load Balancing), Layer 3 and IPv6 software.
• Brocade ServerIron ADX 4000: A 4U chassis configuration with one switch fabric
module, one AC or DC power supply, and one fan module. It can be configured with
one management module with a dual-core processor, up to two application switching
modules (each with four dual-core processors), one switch fabric module, either two
4-port 10 GbE XFP line cards, two 12-port GbE RJ45 line cards, two 12-port GbE SFP
line cards, or a combination of two of those three options, and up to two AC or DC
power supplies.
• ServerIron ADX 10000: A 10U chassis configuration with two switch fabric modules,
two AC or DC power supplies, and one dual-fan module. It can be configured with up
to two management modules (each with dual-core processors), up to four application
switching modules (each with four dual-core processors), either four 4-port 10 GbE
XFP line cards, four 12-port GbE RJ45 line cards, four 12-port GbE SFP line cards, or
any combination of up to four modules consisting of those three options, and up to
four AC or DC power supplies.
Q What is ServerIron ADX 1008-1?
A To enrich the ADX product line with an innovative entry-level offering, the ADX 1000 1U
fixed configuration platform was enhanced with a license based capacity on demand
system. The ADX 1000 can be ordered in the traditional factory-licensed configurations
ranging from the new, value-priced entry-level ADX 1008-1 with 8 10/100/1000 BASE–T
ports, one application processor, and one AC or DC power supply, all the way up to the
ADX 1216-4, with 16 10/100/1000 BASE–T ports, two 10 GbE XFP ports, four
application processors, as well as SSL acceleration hardware, GSLB (Global Server Load
Balancing), Layer 3 and IPv6 software.
However, in addition to these traditionally ordered factory configurations, any ADX 1000,
beginning with the new ADX 1008-1, can now be upgraded to any higher configuration
through instant software-based license activation pay-as-you-grow options, without
removing the switches from service—another example of the many ways Brocade
continues to deliver superior customer choice and investment protection.
Q What is ADX release 12.2?
A Brocade continues to innovate with new features and functionality for Enterprise and
Service Provider networks in its application delivery product line. The 12.2 release
includes IPv6 gateway functionality (v6 to v4 and v6 to v4+v6), IPv6 Syn-Proxy capability,
extends L7 CSW scripting to non-HTTP protocols such as FIX protocol, enhances
Transparent Cache Switching (TCS), adds response time based load balancing algorithm,
and the Web GUI management additions such as simplified code upgrade and generic
HTTP template, along with numerous new features, tested or certified interoperable with
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the leading technology partners and enterprise business applications and significantly
extending the range of solutions this powerful platform can provide.
Q What is Application Resource Broker?
A Working in tandem with ServerIron ADX, Brocade Application Resource Broker (ARB), is
an infrastructure software component used by IT operations staff who seek simplified,
on-demand application resource provisioning and de-provisioning within their data
centers. ARB assures adherence to application Service Level Agreements by dynamically
adding and removing application resources (VM’s) based on real-time monitoring of
infrastructure capacity and responsiveness.
Q What is the business case for this product?
A In tandem with ServerIron ADX, ARB delivers the key enabling technology to provide on-
demand services within a shared-infrastructure data center—commonly referred to as an
enterprise cloud. Brocade is enabling business-oriented and SLA-assured application
delivery with dynamically provisioned application infrastructure resources to
accommodate variable traffic loading for current and high-growth services. This
technology can reduce or eliminate the inefficiencies and high cost of provisioning for
peak load across thousands of applications, while ensuring resiliency in the delivery of
those services, and avoiding missed SLAs due to under-provisioning. Typical savings
include reduced intervention costs when remediating estimation errors and application
SLA issues, reduced power, cooling, space to service existing traffic demands and more
efficient infrastructure that can absorb the delivery of new business processes or
increased traffic without incurring additional capital expense.
Q What is the key or distinguishing feature of Application Resource Broker?
A As an extension to Brocade ServerIron ADX application delivery controllers, Application
Resource Broker can dynamically add and remove application resources when needed,
based on application traffic demands. This is achieved through real-time correlation of
application performance from the network and infrastructure capacity information from
server infrastructures like VMware. The Resource Broker leverages ADX’ unique position
in the network to provide real-time monitoring of application loading that drives
immediate, intelligent, and impactful response to changing application traffic demands.
This ultimately assures highly reliable service levels between end users and application
infrastructure without incurring the high cost of over-provisioning. The unique
combination of ServerIron ADX with Application Resource Broker associates the various
application components to their respective virtualized resources, enabling true
application-level visibility for IT operations. It is this pairing of application-centric visibility
with automated, on-demand provisioning that enables an on-demand virtualized IT
infrastructure.
Q Does Application Resource Broker support VMware vSphere 4.0
A Yes, Application Resource Broker supports vSphere/ESX 4.0
Q Will Application Resource Broker support other virtualization and orchestration
environments?
A Yes. As a proponent of standards-based compatibility and interoperability with the
widest range of virtualization and orchestration vendors, and to ensure customer choice
and flexibility, it is our intention to support other orchestration tools in the future
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Q When do these products become generally available?
A The ADX series became generally available on July 1, 2009 through Brocade Distributors
and Resellers. The ADX release 12.2, the ADX 1008-1, ADX capacity-on-demand
upgrade activation, and the Application Resource Broker will be generally available at the
beginning of the second half of 2010.
Marketplace
Q Why is Brocade in the application delivery controller market and how does ADX fit into
the overall Brocade strategy?
A For the past decade, Brocade has brought technology leadership to Layer 4-7 switching
with more than 3000 high-profile customers. Building on a strategy of growth and
diversification, Brocade has been addressing the problem of growing data center
operational complexity resulting from increased consolidation and virtualization.
As server virtualization and the Enterprise cloud service model becomes commonplace
in production environments while the growth of Web-based applications and mobile
clients continues unabated, application delivery capacity, performance and management
requirements will multiply, particularly in the 10 GbE connectivity segment.
Brocade brings deep experience in the design, deployment, and management of highavailability, high-reliability data center networks—focusing on the client side of server
farm connectivity and management. Moreover, Brocade can deliver the right solutions to
this rapidly growing market segment based on decades of Local Area Network (LAN) and
Storage Area Network (SAN) experience, as well as a proven history of developing the
most robust products and services.
This rapidly growing segment is an integral component of service provider and enterprise
data center cloud services. As data centers become increasingly virtualized, application
delivery platforms must grow in capacity, performance and intelligence, to optimize
delivery for larger online customer volumes and growing numbers of enterprise
application users—all connecting to ever-increasing numbers of virtualized applications.
With the addition of Application Resource Broker, Brocade demonstrates continuing
focus on application delivery solutions that optimize the end user experience while
ensuring efficient resource usage.
In addition:
• Brocade already provides high-performance and high-availability data storage access;
fabric extensibility and robustness; and streamlined fabric management for the most
demanding business applications. Adding Web client access, security, IPTV, and
Voice over IP (VoIP) application delivery is a natural extension to this business.
• Brocade has been leading the evolution of data centers by delivering highly reliable,
high-performance core data center products and services for over a decade.
• The Brocade vision is aligned with current data center needs, with a singular focus on
securely managing, sharing, and protecting data.
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• Key elements of this vision are to simplify data networks and provide a foundation for
critical solutions—such as server virtualization, data mobility, and data protection—
running seamlessly without costly manual intervention or performance bottlenecks.
• Intelligent application delivery plays a crucial role in the success of this end-to-end
vision, and will help Brocade provide high-performance hardware and software
products with proven interoperability.
Technologies
Q What is unique or advanced about the ServerIron ADX architecture?
Q Compared to the many competitive offerings, the ServerIron ADX switches deliver
extremely high application throughput based on an advanced design that features
complete physical and logical separation of the application and management planes. In
fact, the multichip, multicore, application processing plane is designed for the highest
core density and performance upgradability.
This architecture utilizes modular hardware design to accelerate application processing
and to optimize the distribution and flow of internal traffic to a large number of
application cores. The high-speed non-blocking switching fabric uniquely supports
application processing, I/O, and management modules to maximize flexibility. The data
plane provides high-density 10 Gbps support with hardware assist for linear session
distribution across multiple application cores. In addition, the management modules
feature field-upgradable mezzanine cards for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and other
planned future functions such as compression.
The ServerIron ADX switches are simple to configure and manage using the Brocade
Command Line Interface (CLI) or built-in browser-based interface. The CLI uses wellknown industry-standard syntax for fast error-free configuration. The switches support
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to allow device management using
applications such as HP OpenView and Brocade IronView® Network Manager (INM).
Q How does the ServerIron ADX improve network performance?
Q The ServerIron ADX switches use deep packet inspection and content transformation,
beyond the traditional Layer 2 and 3 packet headers, directing client requests to the
optimal servers. These intelligent Layer 4-7 application switches transparently support
any TCP- or UDP-based applications and provide specialized application acceleration,
server-offload, connection management, and network optimization.
The ServerIron ADX switches also provide a reliable line of defense by securing servers
and applications against many types of intrusion and attack without sacrificing
performance. In addition, they provide efficient traffic distribution among infrastructure
devices such as firewalls, DNS servers and cache servers. The ADX devices also deliver
high performance for higher-layer application switching functions. Intelligent content
switching capabilities include customizable rules based on URL, HOST, cookies and other
HTTP headers, XML, and application content.
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