Brocade Adds IPv6, Performance Increase To ADX Appliance

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.Brocade also enhanced its Application Resource Broker, adding a number of capabilities to support provisioning and de-provisioning of virtual machines, to select the correct virtual machine to automatically add to a pool, to identify the correct ESX host, and to support adding VMs in a specific order so that servers are brought online in the proper order. The ARB can also set a period to ensure that capacity is added to an application based on sustained demand versus responding to short-lived spikes.

New reporting features have been added, as well. Granted, these features should probably have been available in the first version of ARB, since dependency order and rational capacity management are critical features of any orchestration process, but if your company is looking seriously at orchestration, a more full-featured orchestration software suite is probably in your future. 

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