Brocade SLX-9850

Announced August 2016 at Tech Field Day.

Brocade positions this as a router successor to the MLXe with about 15X more switching capacity. During the introductory session at Tech Field Day, Brocade was asked to spill the beans on the merchant silicon. Not clear that absent a direct question they would have said. The switch is the Jericho varient from the Dune family.

The Brocade SLX-9850 has an 8-slot (pictured here) and 4-slot version. There is also a fixed configuration model which presumably uses the Qumran chip without the crossbar interface.

Brocade has increased the size of the line cards relative to the MLXe. They are 1.5 RU. Jericho uses DRAM external to the switch as its packet memory. That makes deep buffers a standard system feature. Each ASIC has its own memory pool and supports six 100 Gb/s ports. Port brothers in a single pool can share memory as needed. There are two line card types:

D has 4 GB per ASIC and space for 256K IPv4 routes

M has 6 GB per ASIC and space for 1M IPv4 routes

Within each type there are QSFP cards that can support 36 x 100G or 60 x 40G or 240 X 10G (with splitter cables). There are SFP cards that can support 72 x 1/10 Gb/s. No support for 25 Gb/s has been announced.