Brocade has announced new network visibility solutions and a partner ecosystem to provide mobile network operators with critical insights about the traffic on their networks, thereby transitioning visibility about their infrastructure from being closed and monolithic to software enabled, open and disaggregated.

Mobile network operators are under pressure as declining ARPUs from voice services are not being sufficiently offset by the ARPU growth from mobile data. At the same time, customer adoption of over-the-top services is increasing, requiring even more network capacity and performance. This trend has been driving the build-out of 4G/long term evolution (LTE) networks, which is thereby leading to early planning for upcoming 5G deployment. During these transitions, mobile operators are increasingly relying on visibility and analytics to control costs and enable new premium services and revenue streams. Unfor­tu­na­tely, traditional visibility infrastructures were not designed to support the latest generation of mobile networks. However, Brocade’s innovative approach to build an open, software-enabled visibility infrastructure addresses this key challenge.

The Brocade network visibility product family includes:

  • Brocade MLXe packet brokers and Brocade ICX packet brokers: This solution includes a comprehensive family of packet brokers to address the wide range of density, performance and programmability needs of Tier I mobile operators.
  • Brocade virtual packet broker: This is a full-feature, virtual packet broker for virtualised engineering, procurement and construction environments.
  • Brocade session director: This includes software-based separ-ation of mobile control flow processing in the visibility network to deliver maximum scalability, real-time programmability of packet brokers and enhanced network intelligence.
  • Brocade packet probes: This includes software-based, scalable, wire speed packet processing engines that decode and reduce mobile bearer and control traffic to extract and deliver the essential metadata required by network monitoring and analytics solutions.
  • Brocade visibility manager: This is a single-pane-of-glass management application for the entire Brocade network visibility solution.
  • Open APIs: Application programming interfaces (APIs) bet­ween Brocade and third-party components help ensure freedom of choice at each layer of the visibility infrastructure.

This combined solution transforms the mobile operator’s visibility infrastructure to provide more agility and choice. The software-driven approach also delivers real-time programmability of packet brokers and a dynamic, scale-out architecture that supports 100 million subscribers per packet core.

The product features and benefits include:

  • Scalable, dynamic architecture supporting up to 100 million subscribers per packet core.
  • Real-time programmability of network packet brokers to optimise traffic sent to probes and analytics applications.
  • SDN programmability of the packet network to influence network behaviour based on improved visibility and analytics.
  • Virtual packet brokers and virtual packet probes to deliver capacity on demand.
  • Single-pane-of-glass management across physical and virtual visibility infrastructure.