Brocade Disrupts the Traditional Network Visibility Market with Comprehensive New IP Solution

Mobile network operators are under significant pressure as the declining Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) derived from voice services is not being sufficiently offset by the ARPU growth from mobile data. At the same time, customer adoption of Over-The-Top (OTT) services -- such as video -- is exploding, requiring even more network capacity and performance.

This trend is driving the build-out of 4G/LTE networks and early planning for the upcoming deployment of 5G. In these transitions, mobile operators are increasingly relying on visibility and analytics to both 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.

To address this key challenge, Brocade today announced new Network Visibility solutions and a partner ecosystem to empower mobile network operators with critical insights into the traffic within their networks, while also transitioning their visibility infrastructures from being closed and monolithic to software-enabled, open, and disaggregated.



With an open and software-centric architecture -- cornerstones of the New IP -- Brocade is redefining visibility infrastructures found in mobile packet cores today, enabling mobile operators to accelerate their journey to an agile infrastructure that can support the explosive data growth and capacity demands of 4G/LTE and future 5G mobile networks. The software-driven approach also delivers real-time programmability of the packet brokers, and a dynamic, scale-out architecture that supports an unprecedented 100 million subscribers per packet core.

The Brocade® Network Visibility product family includes:
  • Brocade MLXe Packet Brokers and Brocade ICX® Packet Brokers: A comprehensive family of packet brokers to address the wide range of density, performance, and programmability needs of Tier-1 mobile operators
  • Brocade Virtual Packet Broker: The industry's first full-featured, virtual TAP/packet broker for vEPC environments
  • Brocade Session Director: Software-based separation 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: Software-based, scalable, wire-speed packet processing engines that decode and reduce mobile bearer and control traffic to extract and deliver essential metadata required by network monitoring and analytics solutions
  • Brocade Visibility Manager: A single-pane-of-glass management application for the entire Brocade Network Visibility solution
  • Open APIs: Application programming interfaces between Brocade and third-party components to help ensure freedom of choice at each layer of the visibility infrastructure

Comments