Networking vendor Brocade is expanding its campus switching portfolio with a new switch. The ICX 6610 is the new flagship campus switch from Brocade, delivering more bandwidth than previous products.
The need to expand campus capabilities is all about providing an on ramp to the cloud.
“To get to the cloud you have to go through the campus,” Joe Ammirato, senior director product management at Brocade told InternetNews.com. “You might be at work accessing the public cloud, but it’s going through a campus network.
As such, Ammirato stressed that it’s important that campus networks are designed properly to leverage the cloud and create an optimal end-user experience. Overall, Brocade sees the campus network at a portal to the cloud.
The ICX 6610 is a stackable switch that provide 8 x 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) ports. There is also support for 4 x 40 GbE ports on the switch.
“The 4 x 40 GbE ports will primarily be used for stacking,” Ammirato said.
The way that stacking would work with 40 GbE is that if all four ports are used a ring of up to 8 ICX 6610 switches can be stacked together. Ammirato noted that another scenario could see an administrator using only two 40 GbE ports and use them for stacking and then use the other two 40 GbE ports for uplinks.