Learn More About Brocade NetIron XMR Series

The Brocade NetIron XMR Series of Internet backbone routers provides unparalleled performance (up to 2 billion PPS) in a multi-terabit architecture. These routers offer highly scalable IPv4/IPv6 routing, fast BGP convergence, and advanced MPLS capabilities such as MPLS VPNs. They provide industry-leading wire-speed 10 GbE and POS port density, and are ideal for Internet backbones and service provider cores.

Today's Service Providers face a number of challenges that require a new breed of solutions in order to ensure successful and profitable operation. Service Providers operate in an environment of fierce competition that continues to drive service pricing down. A smooth introduction of new, reliable, and scalable services poses a challenge to many Service Providers, yet, is crucial to expanding the subscriber base, and improving subscriber retention. Adding to these challenges is an exponential growth trend in Internet traffic that continues to erode network capacities. Furthermore, ensuring and increasing profitability are key goals for any Service Provider, which presents the additional challenges of controlling Capital Expenditures (CapEx) and Operational Expenditures (OpEx).

The Brocade NetIron XMR Series routers are built to effectively address all these hurdles by offering the state-of-the-art in hardware and software design. Based on a superior terabit-scale architecture that includes the Brocade cutting-edge fifth generation network processors, this series comprises the industry's most powerful, high density IPv4/IPv6/MPLS multi-service routers. To enable the deployment of scalable, high value, and profitable services, the NetIron XMR Series offers highly versatile, cost-efficient solutions for Internet routing, inter-Metro backbones, large scale multi-service backbones, and IP carrier's carrier transport.

The NetIron XMR Series includes the 4-slot NetIron XMR 4000, 8-slot NetIron XMR 8000, the 16-slot NetIron XMR 16000, and the 32-slot NetIron XMR 32000. The series offers industry-leading port capacity and density for both Carrier Ethernet and Packet over SONET/SDH (POS) with up to 128 10-GbE, 640 1-GbE, 64 OC-192 (STM-64), or 256 OC-48 (STM-16) ports in a single chassis, high density router.


The NetIron XMR Series is designed from the ground up for high performance and scalability to address the needs of the most demanding ISP, Internet data center, inter-Metro connectivity, and multi-service operator applications. All routers in the series feature wire-speed, low latency, and low jitter routing for IPv4, IPv6, MPLS, and MPLS VPN services, and they support both edge (PE) and core (P) router deployments. For metropolitan area networks (MANs), the NetIron XMR Series is capable of wire-speed, low latency, and low jitter Layer 2 switching to allow for cost-efficient and seamless integration with Layer 2 MANs or Layer 2 MAN access layers without compromising performance.

Designed for high-end routing applications, the NetIron XMR Series features Brocade Direct Routing technology for full Forwarding Information Base (FIB) programming in hardware, together with hardware-based wire-speed access control lists (ACLs) and policy-based routing (PBR) for robust, high performance IPv4, IPv6, and Layer 3 VPN routing. Complementary to FDR is a full suite of unicast and multicast routing protocols for both IPv4 and IPv6. Supported IPv4 protocols include RIP, OSPF, IS-IS, BGP4, PIM-DM, PIM-SM/SSM, IGMP, BGP-MP for multicast, and MSDP. Supported IPv6 protocols include RIPng, OSPFv3, IS-IS, BGP-MP for IPv6 (BGP4+), PIM-SSM, and MLD. Building on this solid routing architecture, the NetIron XMR routers also provide dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 wire-speed routing to facilitate a seamless migration to IPv6 without sacrificing performance.

A comprehensive set of path calculation and signaling capabilities using OSPF-TE, IS-IS/TE, RSVP-TE, CSPF, and LDP allows the creation of both traffic engineered and non traffic engineered infrastructures. Within either infrastructure, the NetIron XMR Series supports IP over MPLS as well as MPLS VPN applications. The NetIron XMR Series supports all three popular MPLS VPN services, Virtual Leased Line (VLL), LDP-Based Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), and BGP/MPLS VPN, on all ports at wire-speed.

In addition, the NetIron XMR Series offers Multi-VRF Routing for environments where virtual routing is needed without the complexity of MPLS. Using Multi-VRF Routing, backbone operators can create multiple routing protocol instances that peer with each other in completely virtualized domains while sharing the same physical routers and links. The NetIron XMR Series is able to support overlapping IP address spaces through complete separation of the routing tables. Forwarding plane separation is supported through the use of standard 802.1Q VLAN tags.

The NetIron XMR Series is also designed for enabling the evolving multi-service and triple-play infrastructures. Built with an innovative view of Virtual Output Queuing (VOQ) architectures, packet buffering, and packet scheduling, the NetIron XMR routers offer non-blocking packet forwarding and large capabilities for handling severe congestion scenarios. Built on that superior foundation, the NetIron XMR routers deliver a comprehensive suite of QoS mechanisms to enable next-generation architectures. Using the NetIron XMR routers, operators can implement eight distinct traffic classes of prioritization with true performance guarantees. Operators can implement those performance guarantees by choosing from different packet scheduling schemes and tweaking the associated configurable parameters. Additionally, by relying on DSCP Drop Precedence, operators can take advantage of Weighted Random Early Discard (WRED) for differentiated packet dropping in case of congestion within a given traffic class.

High availability, crucial to converged networks, is ensured through a combination of highly resilient hardware and software design, and advanced failure detection and traffic protection/restoration schemes. The routers feature complete hardware redundancy combined with resilient software featuring hitless failover and hitless software upgrades with OSPF and BGP graceful restart for maximizing router uptime. The Multi-Service IronWare operating system, powering the NetIron XMR routers, offers advanced capabilities for rapid detection and bypass of link/node failures like BFD, UDLD, MPLS FRR, and Hot Standby paths.

With security an increasing concern for today's operators, the NetIron XMR routers offer a powerful set of security mechanisms that allow operators to enhance both infrastructure security and subscriber security. Featuring highly scalable inbound and outbound ACLs, operators can implement security policies for IPv4 and IPv6, as well as Layer 2 through the NetIron XMR Series. These policies can be applied permanently or on demand without impacting normal operations. Receive ACLs further harden platform and infrastructure security, allowing operators to implement strict policies for controlling management traffic and control traffic. To counter IP address spoofing used in many forms of DoS attacks, the NetIron XMR routers offer hardware-based wire-speed Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF) for both edge applications (strict mode), and backbone applications (loose mode). uRPF allows the routers to check the packet's source IP address against the routing table to ensure that the packet came from a valid, and expected, source network.

Using the NetIron XMR routers, operators can combine the benefits of SONET/SDH long haul transport and the large cost effective capacity of Carrier Ethernet in many POPs. The routers offer a portfolio of native POS interfaces with speeds ranging from OC-12 (STM-4) to OC-192 (STM-64) allowing for native connectivity to SONET/SDH optical transport equipment or to existing POS routers with distances up to 80 km. Carrier Ethernet interfaces offer distances up to 80 km for 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and up to 150 km for Gigabit Ethernet. In addition, the routers offer operators cost effective 10 Gigabit Ethernet transport over OC-192 (STM-64) links using IEEE standard 10 Gigabit Ethernet WAN PHY.