Brocade, a networking solutions provider, said it has reached a major milestone in 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) industry with the delivery of its 100th blade.

From initial customer shipments of 100 GbE in last June, Brocade has now become a leading provider of carrier-grade 100 GbE routing solutions for service providers and enterprises worldwide, the company said in a statement.

By November, Brocade had delivered its 100th two-port blade to the European particle physics laboratory, Cern, one of the world’s largest centers for scientific studies based in Switzerland, as a critical component to accelerate its research, it added.

Exponential bandwidth growth and the need for faster connectivity has forced network operators to carefully plan for future capacity requirement, said a statement from Brocade.

This growth affects virtually all networks, including the public internet where bandwidth is doubling every 18 to 24 months, it added.

Cern’s demanding environment exceeds 15 petabytes or 15 million gigabytes of data traffic per year. To put this number in perspective, 15 petabytes is equivalent to approximately 200 years of continuously running HD-quality video.

Many of the world's top service providers and premier research institutes have surpassed the performance requirements that 10 GbE can deliver via their high throughput networks and applications.

This growing demand and requirement for greater bandwidth is clear.

According to estimates by Infonetics Research, between 2010 and 2015, 100 Gigabit port sales are expected to have a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 214 per cent compared to 58 per cent for 10 Gigabit connectivity.

"We first selected Brocade MLXe routers one year ago because it was a perfect fit for our stringent networking requirements in the near-and-long term; now that we are ready for 100 GbE. It was a simple line card addition to multiply our network performance," said Jean-Michel Jouanigot, communication systems leader, IT Department, at Cern."

"Gigabit Ethernet connectivity is still going strong in the enterprise LAN, but within performance-driven environments the CAGR is at a negative growth rate," said Zeus Kerravala, principal at ZK Research.

"While some organizations will continue to grow incrementally by link aggregating multiple ports of 10 GbE, there is a growing group of ultra high performance research institutes and service providers that will need to jump immediately to 100 GbE to remain competitive," he added.

In addition to Cern, Brocade has had successful 100 GbE deployments with large internet exchange points, content delivery network providers, and research organizations, such as the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, Limelight Networks and Howard Hughes Medical Institute.-TradeArabia News Service