Foundry NetIron MLX

NETIRON MLX-4, MLX-8, MLX-16

High Value MPLS-Enabled Switching Routers

NetIron MLX

Highlights

  • 4-, 8-, and 16-slot scalable IPv4/IPv6/MPLS/VRF-enabled routers
  • Advanced Metro Ethernet L2 Services
  • Scalable, wire-speed IPv4, IPv6, and MPLS routing featuring Foundry’s unique FDR technology
  • Virtual Routing in non-MPLS environments via Multi-VRF
  • Industry leading port density scaling up to 64 10-GbE / 320 1-GbE ports per system, and up to 192 10-GbE / 960 1-GbE ports in a standard 7 foot rack
  • High Availability design with redundant management modules, switch fabrics, power supplies, fans, and hitless failover
  • Fully distributed non-blocking architecture with up to 1.536 Tbps full-duplex data capacity (960 Mpps) per system
  • Carrier-grade Quality of Service
  • SONET/SDH interoperability with 10-GbE WAN PHY
  • Ideal for a wide range of advanced applications in Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), Internet edge/aggregation routing, high-security data centers, large enterprise core, and High Performance Computing (HPC)

Overview

Network planners today have to ensure that the solution chosen provides the right mix of functionality and high performance while reducing the total cost of ownership. In addition, a solid network design needs to be future-proof, in order to cope with the rapid pace of technology change. The increasing role of the converged network makes high availability and Quality of Service (QoS) crucial to the success of many of today’s rollouts. When selecting equipment, planners also need to have peace of mind that features may be enabled in the future without the need to purchase additional hardware or software.

The NetIron MLX Series of switching routers is designed to meet all these requirements and more. Built with Foundry’s state-of-the-art fifth generation network processor-based architecture and Terabit scale switch fabrics, the Foundry NetIron MLX Series routers offer network planners a rich set of high performance IPv4/IPv6/MPLS/Multi-VRF as well as advanced Layer 2 switching capabilities. These advanced switching routers offer a wide-range of capabilities that address the diverse needs of environments ranging from Metro networks, ISP, data centers, large enterprises, government networks, education/research, and high-performance computing environments.

The NetIron MLX Series includes the 4-slot NetIron MLX-4, 8-slot NetIron MLX-8, and the 16-slot NetIron MLX-16. The series offers industry leading port capacity and density with up to 64 10-GbE / 320 1-GbE ports per system, and up to 192 10-GbE / 960 1-GbE ports in a standard 7 foot rack.

Designed for enabling reliable converged infrastructures, and supporting mission critical applications, the NetIron MLX Series features an advanced N+1 redundant switch fabric architecture that ensures very high availability. The architecture ensures that the system continues to operate at peak performance even in the case of a switch fabric card failure. This advanced architecture also ensures that the system can continue to operate in the highly unlikely case of additional fabric failures, offering a graceful degradation mode, whereby the system tunes its performance to the remaining fabric capacity. The redundant fabric architecture is complemented by comprehensive hardware redundancy for the management modules, power supplies, and cooling system. In addition, the Multi-Service IronWare Operating System, powering the NetIron MLX Series,  offers Hitless Management Failover with BGP and OSPF graceful restart capabilities for further enhancing system and overall network availability.

A comprehensive suite of advanced traffic management and Quality of Service (QoS) functions enables the deployment of triple play service provider networks, and converged enterprise networks supporting voice, video, and data. The NetIron MLX Series offers advanced bandwidth control capabilities with two-rate three-color traffic policers for providing committed bandwidth to users and/or applications. The NetIron MLX switching routers also offer advanced packet marking, prioritization, queuing, and scheduling with Weighted Random Early Discard (WRED) congestion management for optimal and granular control of bandwidth utilization throughout the network.

In addition, the NetIron MLX Series provides powerful accounting, billing, and Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM) to further enable service providers to drive revenue through tight service level agreements (SLA), and incremental services.

Each NetIron MLX switching router has the lowest power consumption and heat dissipation among routers in its class. The leading density of NetIron MLX Series in a very small form factor yields significant real estate savings for network operators. These unique aspects of the series yield significant savings on power, cooling, and rack space costs, thereby, reducing the overall operating expenditures (OpEx).

Additionally, with 40-GE ready half slots and 100-GE ready full slots, the NetIron MLX provides excellent investment protection for the future. For network architects planning on deploying MPLS-based networks in the future, the NetIron MLX Series provides the ability to upgrade the infrastructure to MPLS-based services without requiring additional investment in software or hardware upgrades.

Advanced Capabilities for a Broad Range of Applications

The NetIron MLX switching routers offer an ideal suite of Layer 2 Metro Ethernet technologies for today’s Metro Service Providers. The NetIron MLX Series enables advanced Layer 2 Metro Ethernet services based on IEEE 802.1Q, Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP), Foundry’s proprietary Metro Ring Protocol (MRP), and Virtual Switch Redundancy Protocol (VSRP).  The switching routers offer unique scalability for Layer 2 Metro applications with a capacity of up to 1 Million MAC addresses per system. The series also features highly scalable metro services based on the upcoming IEEE 802.1ad (Provider Bridges) and IEEE 802.1ah (Provider Backbone Bridges).

Complementing Layer 2 Metro Ethernet capabilities is a powerful suite of MPLS capabilities and services, including MPLS-TE, Fast Reroute (FRR), MPLS Virtual Leased Line (VLL), Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), and BGP/MPLS VPNs (RFC 2547bis). This unique combination of advanced services allows operators to combine the simplicity and cost-efficiency of Layer 2 with the granular control and high-availability of MPLS.

For Internet edge/aggregation routing, the NetIron MLX Series also includes Foundry’s cutting edge advanced hardware based routing technology, Foundry Direct Routing (FDR). FDR offers operators secure and robust routing with dual stack IPv4/IPv6 wire-speed routing performance. The NetIron MLX switching routers offer capacities up to 512,000 IPv4 routes in the hardware Forwarding Information Base (FIB), and up to 2 Million BGP routes in the BGP Routing Information Base (RIB), thereby, enabling high performance, scalable, and cost effective Internet edge/aggregation deployments.

The NetIron MLX Series is also a powerful enabler of advanced converged enterprise backbones. Featuring state-of-the-art QoS, wire-speed unicast, and multicast routing for IPv4 and IPv6, the NetIron MLX Series routers efficiently enable the rollout of converged backbones providing reliable transport of Voice over IP (VoIP), video services, and mission critical data.  Virtual routing via Multi-VRF allows enterprises to create multiple security zones and simplified VPNs for the different applications and business units, while streamlining the overall network management. With wire-speed distributed sFlow support, the NetIron MLX switching routers enable scalable network-wide monitoring of flows for traffic trend analysis, capacity planning, malicious traffic detection, and intrusion detection.

For large-scale high-performance cluster computing, the superior 1-GbE and 10-GbE port densities of the NetIron MLX Series are vital for the implementation of these clusters. The state-of-the-art Clos switch fabric architecture in the NetIron MLX Series provides ample capacity for bandwidth intensive applications.  By offering superior data capacity and ultra-low latency below 10 microseconds, the NetIron MLX Series accelerates application performance in high-performance computing clusters used in many applications today like advanced simulation, motion picture special effects, and large-scale data acquisition in physics research facilities.

Key Features

  • Service Provider grade IPv4/IPv6/MPLS/Multi-VRF enabled routers
  • 4, 8, and 16 slot systems (4, 7, 14 RU) for maximum deployment versatility
  • Terabit scale architecture designed for 10-GbE and beyond
  • Up to 960 Mpps routing performance with non-blocking 1.536 Tbps full-duplex data capacity
  • Industry leading port capacity and density with up to 64 10-GbE / 320 1-GbE ports per system, and up to 192 10-GbE / 960 1-GbE ports in a standard 7 foot rack
  • Advanced and scalable Metro Ethernet Layer 2 services
    • Super Aggregated VLANs (Q-in-Q)
    • Sub-second converging Layer 2 control protocols: MRP, VSRP, RSTP
    • IEEE 802.1ad Provider Bridges *
    • IEEE 802ah Provider Backbone Bridges (Ethernet over Ethernet)
  • Wire-speed dual stack IPv4/IPv6 routing
  • Wire-speed Provider Edge (PE) and Provider core (P) Label Switching Routers
  • Industry leading performance for MPLS services providing several service choices: IP over MPLS, Virtual Leased Lines (VLL), Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS), BGP/MPLS VPNs and Multi-VRF with packet-size independent, wire-speed performance on all ports.
  • High performance, robust routing via Foundry Direct Routing (FDR) for complete, distributed programming of the Forwarding Information Base (FIB) in hardware
  • Full suite of unicast and multicast IPv4 and IPv6 routing protocols 
    • Supported IPv4 protocols include RIP, OSPF, BGP-4, IS-IS, PIM-DM, PIM-SM, IGMP, BGP-MP for multicast, MSDP and Anycast RP
    • Supported IPv6 protocols include RIPng, OSPFv3, BGP-MP for IPv6 (BGP4+), PIM-SSM, and MLD
  • Comprehensive MPLS signaling and path calculation algorithms for both traffic engineered as well as non-traffic engineered applications
    • OSPF-TE, RSVP-TE, CSPF
    • LDP
  • Secure Multi-VRF Routing for supporting Virtual Routing applications over non-MPLS backbones
  • Industry leading scalability
    • 2 Million IPv4 BGP routes and up to 256 BGP peers
    • 512K IPv4 routes in hardware (FIB)
    • 112K IPv6 routes in hardware (FIB)
    • 400 BGP/MPLS VPNs and up to 256K VPN routes
    • 4K VLL/VPLS instances and up to 256K VPLS MACs
    • 4094 VLANs, and up to 1M MAC addresses
  • Superior high availability design
    • Redundant management modules
    • Redundant switch fabrics
    • Redundant power supplies and cooling system
    • Hitless Layer 3 and Layer 2 failover for non-stop forwarding
  • Advanced QoS
    • Inbound and outbound two-rate, three-color traffic policers with accounting
    • 8 distinct priority levels
    • WRED support for congestion management and precedence dropping (tunable via configuration)
    • Supports hybrid queue servicing disciplines: Strict Priority + Weighted Fair Queuing
  • Comprehensive hardware-based security and policies
    • Layer 3 and Layer 2 ACLs (both inbound and outbound)
    • Granular ACL accounting (both inbound and outbound)
    • Hardware based packet filtering
    • Hardware based policy based routing (PBR)
    • Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF)
    • Receive ACLs
    • Extensive sFlow Layer 2-7 traffic monitoring for IPv4, IPv6 and MPLS services
  • 10-GbE WAN PHY support for cost efficient SONET/SDH connectivity

* Available Summer 2006

 

Feature

NetIron MLX-4

NetIron MLX-8

NetIron MLX-16

Interface Slots

4

8

16

Switch Fabric Capacity

960 Gbps

1.92 Tbps

3.84 Tbps

System Data Switching Capacity

384 Gbps

768 Gbps

1.536 Tbps

Data Switching Capacity per 7’ Rack

3.84 Tbps

4.608 Tbps

4.608 Tbps

Packet Routing Performance per System

240 Million pps

480 Million pps

960 Million pps

Packet Routing Performance per 7’ Rack

2.4 Billion pps

2.88 Billion pps

2.88 Billion pps

Switch Fabric Redundancy

2+1

2+1

3+1

Max 10-GbE Ports per System

16

32

64

Max 10-GbE Ports per 7’ Rack

176

192

192

Max 1-GbE Ports per System

80

160

320

Max 1-GbE Ports per 7’ Rack

880

960

960

Height (inches / rack units)

6.96” / 4 RU

12.21” / 7 RU

24.47” / 14 RU

Power Supply Redundancy

1+1, 1+2

N+1, 1+1

N+1, 1+1

Air Flow

Side to Side

Side to Side

Front to Back


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