Brocade's enhancements to its Server Iron ADX appliance are aimed at service and hosting providers needing to support IPv6, manage increased demand and support automated service management. The enhancements, which are available to existing customers with a support contract, set the ADX up for high-volume installations that are going to need future proofing.
A key part of the migration will involve a period of IPv4-to-IPv6 and IPv6-to-IPv4 translation as companies cut over to IPv6 at varying times. Enterprises can do the translation themselves or rely on their service providers. Brocade's ADX 12.3 offers IPv6-to-IPv4 translation using Stateful NAT64 , which is an Internet draft defining translation between the two transport protocols.
With NAT64, servers still using IPv4 addresses will be reachable via IPv6 clients while IPv6 servers will be reachable from IPv4 clients. The translation is transparent to both the server and the client, and will ensure a smooth transition. For service providers--hosting, cloud, SaaS, etc.--having a bridge between IPv4 and IPv6 is going to be critical for existing and new businesses.
ADX 12.3 also includes a claimed doubling of performance, primarily in the area of connections per seconds, which is often the limiting factor in application performance. Brocade claims the ADX can support 3 million connections per second. The throughput in bits per second, 70Gbps for the ADX 10000, doesn't change.
The new version of ADX software takes advantage of existing hardware to achieve the performance gains. Brocade says that the driving factor is the need that mobile providers have to support the explosion of connections per second, primarily from HTTP applications.
