Brocade outlined the first phase of a long-term corporate strategy to develop an open and modular networking platform for cloud and telecommunications service providers.
The Brocade Vyatta Platform, which is the first phase this strategy, encompasses proven Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and emerging SDN technologies based on open standards and open source initiatives. It utilizes established core components, including as the Brocade Vyatta vRouter and Brocade vADX products, along with the open source software projects such as OpenDaylight and OpenStack.
The architecture of the Brocade Vyatta Platform is comprised of three core layers: NFV Connection Services, SDN Structural Services and Functional Orchestration. Each layer of this open architecture is modular and enables customers to select the products and/or solutions that fit their particular data center requirements:
- NFV Connection Services: Deploy Layer 3-7 network functionality with the Brocade Vyatta vRouter and the Brocade vADX products, along with service chains including third-party elements where needed.
- SDN Structural Services: Leverage the rapid advancements of the multivendor OpenDaylight Project to simplify management through centralized control.
- Functional Orchestration: Engage a vast range of capabilities from OpenStack and widely interoperable third-party provisioning and orchestration layers.
Communication between the layers utilizes transparent standards-based protocols and methods, including REST APIs and the NETCONF/YANG model, to ensure configuration interoperability.
“The growing complexity of today’s virtualized networks has made it no longer feasible to rely on a single vendor to deliver an end-to-end solution that fits every customer’s requirements of service agility and scalability,” said Kelly Herrell, vice president and general manager of Software Networking at Brocade. “The Brocade Vyatta Platform is the industry’s first truly open platform to embrace a growing vendor ecosystem dedicated to open standards and open source projects for cloud and telco providers seeking software-based solutions to achieve new revenue streams and regain control over their networks.”
For example, the NFV Connection Services components of the Brocade Vyatta Platform are anchored through the Layer 3-7 capabilities of the Brocade Vyatta vRouter and Brocade vADX products, which are available today and deployed worldwide. For more information on Brocade SDN and NFV products, visit
In May 2013, Brocade announced a series of networking hardware and software products including the Brocade Vyatta vRouter, the Brocade Virtual ADX Application Delivery Switch, the Brocade MLXe 4×40 GbE Core Router module, Brocade the NetIron CES/CER Carrier Ethernet Switch/Router modules and a Brocade NetIron OS update.
Building on its acquisition of Vyatta in 2012, the Brocade Vyatta 5400 vRouter family is a software networking solution for highly virtualized data centers. The latest software release (6.6) adds support for Multicast routing and Dynamic Multipoint VPN (DMVPN). The platform- and hypervisor-agnostic Brocade Vyatta vRouter is already deployed in environments ranging from virtual private data centers to public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), and supports all major hypervisors, including VMware, Microsoft, Citrix and Red Hat.
The Brocade Virtual ADX is a virtual application delivery platform that increases the speed of application resource deployment and differentiated services for dynamic cloud environments. It enables rapid application delivery service provisioning via the SOAP/XML API, enabling integration with third-party or homegrown orchestration and automation tools. Brocade said this is especially useful to validate, test and replicate production or QA environments on demand. Brocade also enhanced its cloud provisioning capability with an update to Brocade Application Resource Broker and continued work on the OpenStack plugin for load balancing as a service.
