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  5. Brocade's MLXe And 100Gb: Bigger, Faster, Denser: Page 2 of 2
Networking

Brocade's MLXe And 100Gb: Bigger, Faster, Denser: Page 2 of 2

Brocade is announcing a new switch chassis, the MLXe, that has more capacity than older models and a dual-port 100Gb line card that the company claims is 1/8 of the price expected by the market, though competitors will eventually catch up. The hardware announcements are focused on speeds and feeds at lower price points, but equally interesting for enterprises is Brocade's unified management platform of data, storage and wireless networking into a single management platform and Brocade's integra
September 15, 2010

The price for the 100GbE card is $194,995, which Brocade claims is 1/8th of the expected market price for 100Gb Ethernet. Brocade is pricing the ports on a demand model. IT can purchase one port for approximately half of the full price and then enable the second port by purchasing an additional license. Demand pricing makes getting to 100Gb less costly for organizations. We can expect the pricing to drop, just like it did with one and 10Gb.

"The MLXe and 100Gb Ethernet announcement is bigger than 100G and price. It's easy to talk speeds and price, but the industry will have an acceleration of announcements. Each will announce a product at a lower price to the previous one to overcome limitations imposed on networks by consolidation," says Andre Kindness, senior analyst, Infrastructure & Operations for Forrester Research.

Brocade is also announcing enhancements to its management application with Brocade Network Advisor, which unifies its storage, wireless and Ethernet networking systems into a single management application. Network Advisor also integrates with products from IBM, Microsoft, and VMware to assist in orchestration and automated management. Unlike Cisco, Brocade is going to be hypervisor agnostic, working with multiple hypervisor vendors like Microsoft and Citrix. It's a strategy that should appeal to IT shops that have multi-vendor environments.

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