RUCKUS ICX 6610-24 Switch
24-Port Chassis-Like Capabilities in a Stackable Form Factor Switch

Overview:

Today's enterprise networks are expected to deliver services thought impossible just a few years ago. High-Definition (HD) video conferencing, real-time collaboration, Unified Communications (UC), and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) are only a few of the applications that organizations are deploying to enhance employee productivity, improve customer service, and create a competitive advantage. These same networks must also provide anytime, anywhere mobile access and scale to meet rising user expectations. At the same time, organizations face continued pressure to reduce costs and do more with less. More than ever, campus networks need to quickly and efficiently evolve with the ever-changing business environment.

• Delivers chassis-level performance and availability, providing an optimal user experience for streaming video, VDI, UC, and other critical applications
• Offers unprecedented stacking performance with 320 Gbps of stacking bandwidth, eliminating interswitch bottlenecks
• Provides up to 1 Tbps of total switching capacity with up to 384 1 GbE and 64 10 GbE per stack for campus network edge and aggregation layers
• Provides unmatched availability with four redundant 40 Gbps stacking ports per switch, hitless stacking failover, hot switch replacement, and dual hotswappable power supplies and fans
• Simplifies network operations and protects investments with the RUCKUS HyperEdge Architecture, enabling consolidated network management and advanced services sharing across heterogeneous switches

Combining the Best of a Chassis and a Stackable Switch

The Brocade®ICX 6610 Switch redefines the economics of enterprise networking by providing unprecedented levels of performance, availability, and flexibility in a stackable form factor-delivering the capabilities of a chassis with the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of a stackable switch.

Class-Leading Performance for Today and Tomorrow
The Brocade ICX 6610 delivers wire-speed, non-blocking performance across all ports to support latency-sensitive applications such as real-time voice/video streaming and VDI. Brocade ICX 6610 Switches can be stacked using four full-duplex 40 Gbps stacking ports that provide an unprecedented 320 Gbps of backplane stacking bandwidth with full redundancy, eliminating inter-switch bottlenecks. Additionally, each switch can provide up to eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports for high-speed connectivity to the aggregation or core layers.

High Availability
When every second matters, Brocade ICX 6610 Switches help deliver continuous availability to optimize the user experience. RUCKUS stacking technology delivers high availability, performing real-time state synchronization across the stack and enabling instantaneous hitless failover to a standby controller in the unlikely event of a failure of the master stack controller. Organizations also can use hot-insertion/removal of stack members to avoid interrupting service when adding a switch to increase the capacity of a stack or replacing a switch that needs servicing.

In addition to stack-level high availability, Brocade ICX 6610 Switches include system-level high-availability features, such as dual hot-swappable, load-sharing, and redundant power supplies. The modular design also has dual hot-swappable fan trays. These features provide another level of availability for the campus wiring closet in a compact form factor. Additional design features include intake and exhaust temperature sensors and fan spin detection to quickly identify abnormal or failed operating conditions-helping to minimize mean time to repair.

Unmatched Simplicity and Investment Protection
The Brocade ICX 6610 is easy to deploy, manage, and integrate into both new and existing networks. Organizations can buy only what they need today and easily scale up as demand grows and new technologies emerge.

The flexibility of a stackable switch allows organizations to forgo investing in a chassis upfront and put precious capital to better use elsewhere. Organizations can purchase an initial switch to get started and add a new Brocade ICX 6610 Switch to the stack as their business grows. With capabilities such as bandwidth on demand, the Brocade ICX 6610 enables organizations to grow their networks when necessary. Organizations can initially deploy 1 GbE uplink ports and upgrade to 10 GbE ports when desired with an easy-to-activate software license. Organizations also have peace of mind with the Brocade Assurance Limited Lifetime Warranty. This warranty can help improve Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) while freeing up both capital and resources to reinvest into the business.

The Brocade ICX 6610 uses standard 40 GbE ports and QSFP cables for stacking. This not only delivers class-leading stacking performance and availability, but also increases cabling options and reduces cable costs-unlike competitive offerings, which rely on proprietary stacking ports and cables. Support for MACsec, SDN, and 40 GbE standards provides maximum future-proofing and investment protection. This enables organizations to deploy these capabilities as needed when more network devices supporting them become available.

Built for the most demanding enterprise network environments

RUCKUS stacking technology makes it possible to stack up to eight Brocade ICX 6610 Switches into a single logical chassis switch, providing simple and robust expandability for future growth at the network edge or aggregation layer. Also, this stacked virtual switch has only a single IP address to simplify management, and offers transparent forwarding across a pool of up to 384 1 GbE and 64 10 GbE ports. When new switches are added to the stack, they automatically inherit the stack's existing configuration file, enabling true plug-and-play network expansion.

RUCKUS stacking technology also delivers high availability, performing real-time state synchronization across the stack and enabling instantaneous hitless failover to a standby controller, if the master stack controller fails. In addition, organizations can use hot-insertion/removal of stack members to avoid interrupting service.

Brocade ICX 6610 Switches offer four dedicated full-duplex 40 Gbps stacking ports that provide full redundancy and an unprecedented 320 Gbps of stacking bandwidth, essentially eliminating the need to work around inter-switch bottlenecks (see Figure 1).

Unlike competitive offerings that use proprietary stacking ports, the use of standard 40 Gbps QSFP ports offers optimum flexibility and futureproofing. These dedicated stacking ports free up the 10 GbE ports for high-speed connectivity to the aggregation or core layers.

Figure 1: Brocade ICX 6610 Switches can be stacked using four standard 40 Gbps QSFP ports that provide a fully redundant virtual chassis backplane with 320 Gbps of stacking bandwidth.

Up to Eight 10 GbE Ports on Demand per Switch
Brocade ICX 6610 Switches offer eight dual-mode Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP)/SFP+ ports, enabling high-bandwidth connectivity to the aggregation or core layers. These ports can be upgraded from 1 GbE to 10 GbE by simply applying a software license, eliminating the need to install a hardware module. In addition, organizations can aggregate these ports across the stack to provide high-speed, redundant links between the wiring closet and the aggregation layer, or between the aggregation and the core layer. With the ability to use short-range and long-range optics, along with copper Twinax cables, the Brocade ICX 6610 supports flexible and cost-effective network architectures.

The Brocade ICX 6610 delivers industry-leading 8-port 10 GbE density in a 1U switch, providing up to 80 Gbps of uplink bandwidth to the aggregation or core layers of the network. This bandwidth enables a 1:1 subscription ratio throughout the network. As a result, organizations can deploy highly utilized networks to avoid congestion during peak hours.

Built to Power Next-Generation Edge Devices
The Brocade ICX 6610 can deliver both power and data across network connections, providing a single-cable solution for the latest edge devices. Brocade ICX 6610 Switches are compatible with industry-standard VoIP equipment as well as legacy IP phones. In addition, they support the Power over Ethernet (PoE+) standard (802.3at) to provide up to 30 watts of power to each device. This highpowered solution simplifies wiring for next-generation edge devices, such as video conferencing and Voice over IP (VoIP) phones, pan/tilt surveillance cameras, and 802.11n wireless Access Points (APs). The PoE capability reduces the number of power receptacles and power adapters while increasing reliability and wiring flexibility. With a 1500- watt power budget per switch (with two power supplies), the Brocade ICX 6610 24- and 48-port PoE models can supply up to Class 4 PoE+ (30 watts) power to every port.

Plug-and-Play Operations for Powered Devices
The Brocade ICX 6610 supports the IEEE 802.1AB Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) and ANSI TIA 1057 Link Layer Discovery Protocol-Media Endpoint Discovery (LLDP-MED) standards that enable organizations to deploy interoperable multivendor solutions for UC. Configuring IP endpoints such as VoIP phones can be a complex task, requiring manual and time-consuming configuration. LLDP and LLDP-MED address this challenge by providing a standard, open method for configuring, discovering, and managing network infrastructure. The LLDP protocols also help reduce operational costs by simplifying and automating network operations. For example, LLDP-MED provides an open protocol for configuring Quality of Service (QoS), security policies, Virtual LAN (VLAN) assignments, PoE power levels, and service priorities.

Flexible Cooling Options
All Brocade ICX 6610 Switches support reversible front-to-back airflow options. This data center-friendly design improves mounting flexibility in racks, while adhering to the cooling guidelines of the hosting environment. Organizations can specify airflow direction at the time of order and can reverse the direction after deployment by swapping the power supplies and fan assembly (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: The Brocade ICX 6610 provides four 40 Gbps high-performance QSFP stacking ports (center) and dual, hot-swappable load-sharing power supplies and fan trays (left and right).

Full Layer 3 Capabilities
Brocade ICX 6610 Switches also offer powerful IPv4 and IPv6 Layer 3 switching capabilities. Organizations can use premium Layer 3 features-such as IPv4/IPv6 OSPF and RIP routing, Policy-Based Routing (PBR), VRRP, and Protocol-Independent Multicast (PIM)- to reduce complexity and enhance the reliability of large enterprise networks by bringing Layer 3 capabilities to the network edge and/or aggregation layer. Advanced Layer 3 capabilities include BGP routing, enabling remote offices to connect Brocade ICX 6610 Switches to service provider networks. Premium and advanced routing capabilities can be added to any Brocade ICX 6610 Switch model through software key-based activation.

SDN-Enabled Programmatic Control of the Network

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a powerful new network paradigm designed for the world's most demanding networking environments and promises breakthrough levels of customization, scale, and efficiency. The Brocade ICX 6610 enables SDN by supporting the OpenFlow 1.3 protocol, which allows communication between an OpenFlow controller and an OpenFlow-enabled switch. Using this approach, organizations can control their networks programmatically, transforming the network into a platform for innovation through new network applications and services. The Brocade ICX 6610 delivers OpenFlow in true hybrid port mode. With RUCKUS hybrid port mode, organizations can simultaneously deploy traditional Layer 2/3 forwarding with OpenFlow on the same port. This unique capability provides a pragmatic path to SDN by enabling network administrators to progressively integrate OpenFlow into existing networks, giving them the programmatic control offered by SDN for specific flows while the remaining traffic is forwarded as before. Brocade ICX 6610 hardware support for OpenFlow enables organizations to apply these capabilities at line rate.

Simplified, Secure Standards-Based Management and Monitoring

The Brocade ICX 6610 provides simplified, standards-based management capabilities that help organizations reduce administrative time and effort while securing their networks.

sFlow-based “Always-On” Network Monitoring
sFlow is a modern, standards-based network export protocol (RFC 3176) that addresses many of the challenges that network managers face today. By embedding sFlow into the Brocade ICX 6610, RUCKUS delivers an “always-on” technology that operates with wire-speed performance. sFlow dramatically reduces implementation costs compared to traditional network monitoring solutions that rely on mirrored ports, probes, and line-tap technologies. Moreover, sFlow gives organizations full, enterprise-wide monitoring capability for every port in the network.

Simplified Deployment with Auto-Configuration
The Brocade ICX 6610 supports auto-configuration, simplifying deployment with a truly plug-and-play experience. Organizations can use this feature to automate IP address and feature configuration of the switches without requiring a highly trained network engineer onsite. When the switches power up, they automatically receive an IP address and configuration from DHCP and Trivial File Transport Protocol (TFTP) servers. At this time, the switches can also automatically receive a software update to be at the same code revision as currently installed switches.

Open-Standards Management
The Brocade ICX 6610 includes an industry-standard Command Line Interface (CLI) and supports Secure Shell (SSHv2), Secure Copy (SCP), and SNMPv3 to restrict and encrypt management communications to the system. In addition, support for Terminal Access Controller Access Control System (TACACS/TACACS+) and RADIUS authentication helps ensure secure operator access.

Out-of-Band Management
The Brocade ICX 6610 includes a 10/100/1000 Mbps RJ-45 Ethernet port dedicated to out-of-band management, providing a remote path to manage the switches, regardless of the status or configuration of the data ports.

Data Center ToR Switch for 1 GbE and 10 GbE Server Connectivity
Thanks to its class-leading 10 GbE port count, the Brocade ICX 6610 is an ideal solution as a Top-of-Rack (ToR) switch in a mixed 1 GbE/10 GbE server connectivity environment. It is designed to fit in server racks, consuming only one rack unit and offering dual integrated power supplies and fan assemblies with reversible front-toback/back-to-front airflow for flexible cooling options. In data center environments where most servers have 1 GbE and some 10 GbE network interfaces, the Brocade ICX 6610 provides a compact and cost-effective 1 GbE/10 GbE ToR switch (see Figure 4). This configuration uses 10 GbE links to connect to Brocade ICX data center aggregation switches.

Unified Wired/Wireless Network Management with Brocade Network Advisor

Managing enterprise campus networks continues to become more complex due to the growth in services that rely on wired and wireless networks. Services such as Internet, e-mail, video conferencing, realtime collaboration, and distance learning all have specific configuration and management requirements. At the same time, organizations face increasing demand to provide uninterrupted services for highquality voice and Unified Communications (UC), wireless mobility, and multimedia applications.

To reduce complexity and the time spent managing these environments, the easy-to-use Brocade Network Advisor discovers, manages, and deploys configurations to groups of IP devices. By using Brocade Network Advisor, organizations can configure Virtual LANs (VLANs) within the network, manage wireless access points, and execute commands on specific IP devices or groups of IP devices. sFlow-based proactive monitoring is ideal for performing network-wide troubleshooting, generating traffic reports, and gaining visibility into network activity from the edge to the core. Brocade Network Advisor centralizes management of the entire family of RUCKUS wired products.