Open Network Featured Article

As the largest public university by enrollment, Arizona State University (ASU) had more than 82,000 students in 2014. When you add faculty and other staff members, the network needed to deliver information and communications technology services is practically that of a small city, but with the added requirements for facilities that conduct highly resource intensive research. In order to ensure the universities innovative research projects don't encounter network related problems, Brocade has been selected to deploy ASU's software-defined network (SDN).

Brocade (News - Alert) has reported ASU is home to the top research taking place in the country to develop new discoveries and advancing the world we live in across a range of fields, including physics, biology and global security initiatives. With so much research taking place at any given time, all of the data that is gathered must be accessible to a large number of people, not only on campus, but to other institutions around the world. Therefore, the University needed a powerful and flexible network with high performance that was future proof for the next generation of network technologies coming in the pipeline.

The SDN solution brought together the Brocade MLXe router, Brocade Flow Optimizer, Brocade SDN Controller, Brocade Topology Manager, Brocade Flow Manager, and Brocade SDN Controller interface to ensure researchers would have the necessary infrastructure in place to access the data and other resources they need at all times.

The university reported an increase in performance from 2 Gbps to more than 10 Gbps when a climatology research scientist was connecting with colleagues at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Yellowstone Cluster with the Brocade SDN deployment.

"Brocade's software-defined networking capabilities enable us to support global research that has purpose and impact. Now we can aggressively pursue funding opportunities that demand built-in, software-defined functionality. Unlike competing institutions that are focused on papers and theoretical components, we're actually doing these things," said Jay Etchings, director of research computing at ASU

Operating under the Brocade SDN Controller, the MLX Series can scale multiservice IP/MPLS, SDN-enabled routers in 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-slot chassis options with fully distributed, non-blocking, and programmable architecture with up to 15.36 Tbps fabric capacity for maximum performance. This type of capacity will give ASU a great value because it future proofs the infrastructure for upcoming network development.