Foundry NetIron XMR

Foundry Networks NetIron XMR

Highlights

• 4-, 8-, and 16-slot high-end IPv4/IPv6/MPLS multi-service routers
• Terabit-scale architecture offering up to 1.536 Tbps data capacity and 960 Mpps per system
• Highly resilient architecture with redundant management modules, switch fabrics, power supplies, fans, and hitless failover
• Up to 64 10 Gigabit Ethernet / 320 Gigabit Ethernet ports per system, and up to 192 10 Gigabit Ethernet / 960 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a standard 7-foot- rack
• Wire-speed IPv4, IPv6, and MPLS routing featuring Foundry’s unique FDR technology
• Comprehensive suite of IPv4 and IPv6 unicast and multicast routing protocols
• High-capacity MPLS L3/L2 VPNs and IP over MPLS routing
• Enables Virtual Routing in non-MPLS environments via Multi-VRF
• SONET/SDH interoperability with 10 Gigabit Ethernet WAN PHY

Foundry Networks XMR Router Information

Service Providers today face a number of challenges that require a new breed of solutions in order to ensure successful and profitable operation. Today’s Service Providers operate in an environment of fierce competition that continues to drive service pricing down. A smooth introduction of new, reliable, and scalable services poses a challenge to many Service Providers, yet, is crucial to expanding the subscriber base, and improving subscriber retention. Adding to these challenges is an exponential growth trend in Internet traffic that continues to erode network capacities. Ensuring and increasing profitability are key goals for any Service Provider, which presents the additional challenges of controlling Capital Expenditures (CapEx) and Operational Expenditures (OpEx).

Foundry’s NetIron XMR Series of routers are architected to effectively address all these hurdles by offering the state-of-the-art in hardware and software design. The NetIron XMR Series comprises the industry’s most powerful, high density IPv4/IPv6/MPLS multi-service routers. The series is based on a superior terabit-scale architecture that includes Foundry’s cutting-edge 5th generation network processors. The NetIron XMR Series offers highly versatile, cost-efficient solutions for Internet routing, Metro core, large scale IP backbones, and IP carrier’s carrier transport, thereby enabling the deployment of scalable, high value, and profitable services.

The NetIron XMR Series includes the 4-slot NetIron XMR 4000 (4 RU), 8-slot NetIron XMR 8000 (7 RU), and the 16-slot NetIron XMR 16000 (14 RU). The series offers industry-leading port capacity and density with up to 64 10 Gigabit Ethernet/320 Gigabit Ethernet ports per system, and up to 192 10 Gigabit Ethernet/960 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a standard 7-foot-rack.

The NetIron XMR Series is designed from the ground up for high performance and scalability to address the needs of the most demanding ISP, Internet Data Center, metro service provider, and multi-service operator applications. All routers in the series feature wire-speed, low latency, and low jitter routing for IPv4, IPv6, MPLS, and MPLS VPN services, and they support both edge and core service provider deployments. For metropolitan area networks (MANs), the NetIron XMR Series is capable of wire-speed, low latency, and low jitter Layer 2 switching to allow for cost-efficient and seamless integration with Layer 2 MANs or Layer 2 MAN access layers without compromising performance.

Designed for high-end routing applications, the NetIron XMR Series features Foundry Direct Routing (FDR) technology for full Forwarding Information Base (FIB) programming in hardware, together with hardware-based wire-speed access control lists (ACLs) and policy-based routing (PBR) for robust, high performance IPv4, IPv6, and Layer 3 VPN routing. Complementary to FDR is a full suite of unicast and multicast routing protocols for both IPv4 and IPv6. Supported IPv4 protocols include RIP, OSPF, IS-IS, BGP4, PIM-DM, PIM-SM, IGMP, BGP-MP for multicast, and MSDP. Supported IPv6 protocols include RIPng, OSPFv3, BGP-MP for IPv6 (BGP4+), PIM-SSM, and MLD. Building on this solid routing architecture, the NetIron XMR routers also provide dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 wire-speed routing to facilitate a seamless migration to IPv6 without sacrificing performance.

A comprehensive set of path calculation and signaling capabilities using OSPF-TE, RSVP-TE, CSPF, and LDP allows the creation of both traffic engineered as well as non-traffic engineered infrastructures. Within either infrastructure, the NetIron XMR Series supports IP over MPLS as well as MPLS VPN applications. The NetIron XMR Series supports all three popular MPLS VPN services, Virtual Leased Line (VLL), LDP-Based Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), and BGP/MPLS VPN as per RFC 2547bis, on all ports at wire-speed.

In addition, the NetIron XMR Series offers Multi-VRF Routing for environments where virtual routing is needed without the complexity of MPLS. Using Multi-VRF Routing, backbone operators can create multiple routing protocol instances that peer with each other in completely virtualized domains while sharing the same physical routers and links. The NetIron XMR Series architecture ensures complete separation of the routing tables, which allows for supporting overlapping IP address spaces. Forwarding plane separation is supported through the use of standard 802.1Q VLAN tags.

The NetIron XMR Series is also designed for enabling the evolving multi-service and triple-play infrastructures. Built with an innovative view of Virtual Output Queuing (VOQ) architectures, packet buffering, and packet scheduling, the NetIron XMR routers offer non-blocking packet forwarding and large capabilities for handling severe congestion scenarios. Built on that superior foundation, the NetIron XMR routers deliver a comprehensive suite of QoS mechanisms to enable next-generation architectures. Using the NetIron XMR routers, operators can implement 8 distinct traffic classes of prioritization with true performance guarantees. Operators can implement those performance guarantees through the NetIron XMR by choosing from different packet scheduling schemes and tweaking the associated configurable parameters. In addition, operators can take advantage of Weighted Random Early Discard (WRED), for differentiated packet dropping in case of congestion within a given traffic class, by relying on DSCP Drop Precedence.

With security an increasing concern for today’s operators, the NetIron XMR routers offer a powerful set of security mechanisms that allow operators to enhance both infrastructure security and subscriber security. Featuring highly scalable inbound and outbound ACLs, operators can implement security policies for IPv4, IPv6, as well as Layer 2 through the NetIron XMR Series. These policies can be applied permanently or on demand without impacting normal operations. Receive ACLs further harden platform and infrastructure security, allowing operators to implement strict policies for controlling management traffic and control traffic. To counter IP address spoofing, used in many forms of DoS attacks, the NetIron XMR routers offer wire-speed Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF) for both edge applications (strict mode), and backbone applications (loose mode). The NetIron XMR’s uRPF is completely hardware driven, and it allows the routers to check the packet’s source IP address against the routing table to ensure that the packet came from a valid (and expected) source network.

To enable long-haul transport, the NetIron XMR Series optics support distances of up to 80 km for 10 Gigabit Ethernet and up to 150 km for Gigabit Ethernet. In addition, the NetIron XMR Series allows operators to connect to existing SONET/SDH OC-192/STM-64 infrastructures through 10 Gigabit Ethernet WAN PHY, which allows for cost-efficient transport up to thousands of kilometers away.

Key Features

• Service provider-grade IPv4/IPv6/MPLS multi-service routers
• 4-, 8-, and 16- slot systems (4, 7, 14 RU) for maximum deployment versatility
• Terabit-scale architecture designed for 10 Gigabit Ethernet and beyond
• Performance of competitor high-end full rack systems in one-third the rack space
• Up to 960 Mpps routing performance with non-blocking 1.536 Tbps data capacity
• Industry-leading port capacity and density with up to 64 10 Gigabit Ethernet/320 Gigabit Ethernet ports per system, and up to 192 10 Gigabit Ethernet/960 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a standard 7’ rack
• Wire-speed dual stack IPv4/IPv6 routing
• Wire-speed edge (PE) and core (P) Label Switching Routers
• Industry-leading performance for MPLS services providing concurrent IP over MPLS, Virtual Leased Lines (VLLs), Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLSes), and BGP/MPLS VPNs at wire-speed
• High-performance, robust routing via Foundry Direct Routing (FDR) for complete 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, and MSDP
• 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 and non-traffic engineered applications
• OSPF-TE, RSVP-TE, CSPF
• LDP
• Powerful Multi-VRF Routing  supports virtual routing applications over non-MPLS backbones
• Industry-leading scalability
• 10 million BGP routes and up to 500 BGP peers
• 1 Million IPv4 routes in hardware (FIB)
• 240,000 IPv6 routes in hardware (FIB)
• 2,000 BGP/MPLS VPNs and up to 1 million VPN routes
• 16,000 VLLs/VPLSes and up to 1 million VPLS MAC addresses
• 4,094 VLANs and up to 2 million 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
• 8 distinct priority levels
• Weighted Random Early Discard (WRED) support for congestion management and precedence dropping (tunable via configuration)
• Support for hybrid queue servicing disciplines: Strict Priority + Weighted Fair Queuing
• State-of-the-art policy enforcement and monitoring for enforcing SLAs and implementing security policies
• Two rate three color traffic policers
• Traffic policer accounting
• Layer 3 and Layer 2 ACLs
• Granular ACL accounting
• 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 Gigabit Ethernet WAN PHY support for cost-efficient SONET/SDH connectivity

Feature	NetIron XMR 4000	NetIron XMR 8000	NetIron XMR 16000
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’-foot-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-foot- 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-foot- rack	176	192	192
Max 1GbE ports per system	80	160	320
Max 1GbE ports per 7-foot-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