Extreme Networks ExtremeRouting SLX 9850-4

Overview:

With mobile connectivity, cloud services, and 4K HD video streaming for billions of devices the norm, and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and augmented reality and virtual reality on the horizon, organizations must modernize the way they communicate and conduct business. In addition to consuming an enormous amount of network capacity, these services increase operational complexity just as organizations are striving to meet customer demands for greater business agility and performance.

To succeed in the digital era, organizations need network platforms that allow them to simplify and speed up operations, without increasing costs. Such platforms incorporate innovative software to analyze and automate network operations, thereby reducing OpEx, and provide flexible deployment options with forwarding performance and scale to dramatically reduce CapEx.

Extensible Routing Platform

The ExtremeRouting SLX 9850 is designed to cost-effectively deliver the density, scale, and performance needed to address the explosive growth in network bandwidth, devices, and services—today and well into the future. This flexible platform, powered by Extreme SLX-OS, provides carrier-class advanced features that leverage proven Extreme routing technology currently deployed in the most demanding data center, service provider, and enterprise networks. And it is all delivered through best-in-class forwarding hardware. The extensible architecture is designed for investment protection, to readily support future requirements for greater bandwidth, scale, and forwarding capabilities. In addition, the SLX 9850 helps address the increasing agility and analytics needs of digital organizations with innovative network automation and visibility enabled through Extreme Workflow Composer™ and the Extreme SLX Insight Architecture.

Features:

High Availability with 230 Tbps-scale Forwarding

The SLX 9850 is the industry’s most powerful IPv4, IPv6, MPLS/Multi-VRF and BGP-EVPN data center router, providing a cost-efficient solution that is purpose-built for the most demanding service provider and enterprise data center applications. The robust system architecture, versatile feature set, and high level of flexibility enable it to scale from the data center spine to the data center core.

Designed with state-of-the-art network processing technology, the SLX 9850 has a non-blocking switching capacity of up to 230 Tbps. An advanced distributed hardware architecture with fine-grained QoS support enables full-duplex, high-speed performance for any mix of IPv4, IPv6, MPLS and BGP-EVPN VXLAN Overlay services. This innovative system architecture offers several distinguishing characteristics:

• Clos-based distributed non-blocking architecture: Provides the foundation for a robust, scalable data center platform.
• Midplane-free design: Allows interface modules to communicate directly with switch fabric modules, enabling the chassis to have an efficient front-to-back airflow design and no signal integrity degradation.
• High-availability implementation: Provides a clear separation between the control plane and data plane at 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) speed to enable operational performance at high loads.
• Distributed network processing, ultra-deep packet buffers, and advanced QoS capabilities across the system: Streamlines execution of a rich feature set at high data rates, even for bursty or long-lived traffic flows.
• Complete redundancy: Features a fully redundant architecture with redundant power supply modules, management modules, fan modules, and switch fabric modules to minimize single points of failure.

The SLX 9850 is available in two different models: the SLX 9850-4, a four interface-slot system, and the SLX 9850-8, an eight interface-slot system. Management modules, interface modules, and power supply modules are interchangeable across both the four- and eight-slot models, thereby decreasing inventory and maintenance costs. All modules are hot-pluggable, minimizing system disruption when adding or replacing a module.

Future-Ready Platform

Maximize investment protection with cost-efficient density, scale, and performance to handle the exponential growth in network bandwidth, devices, and services.

SLX 9850 Extensible Architecture

The SLX 9850 architecture is designed to support connectivity needs today and well into the future as bandwidth and application workload requirements grow. Its interface modules optimize port density and capabilities, leveraging the latest Intel x86 CPU and merchant silicon packet processor technology for optimal space, power, and cooling in a highly reliable, carrier-class routing platform. The SLX 9850 delivers:

• Industry-leading 10/40/100 GbE port density/price per blade
• Interface modules with a 1.5U design for the highest density, routes, statistics, and policy scale
• Industry-leading deep buffers optimized for bursty traffic patterns
• Extreme OptiScale™ optimizes the programmable hardware and software capabilities of the adaptive SLX 9850 to accelerate innovation and deliver investment protection
• Innovative midplane-free design, providing efficient airflow and internal signal integrity for optimal cooling and system performance
• Chassis capacity up to 230 Tbps to support massive traffic scale

Modular, Virtualized Operating System

The SLX 9850 runs SLX-OS, a fully virtualized Linux-based operating system that delivers process-level resiliency and fault isolation. SLX-OS supports advanced routing and MPLS features, and is highly programmable with support for REST and NETCONF, enabling full network lifecycle automation with Workflow Composer. In addition, SLX-OS is based on Ubuntu Linux, which provides all the advantages of open source and access to commonly used Linux tools.

SLX-OS runs in a virtualized environment over a KVM hypervisor, with the operating system compartmentalized and abstracted from the underlying hardware. The core operating system functions for the SLX 9850 are hosted in the system VM, which runs on both management modules in a redundant operation. The SLX 9850 interface module software is also virtualized, running in a KVM hypervisor on the local processor of the interface module.

This approach provides clean failure domain isolation for the router operating system while leveraging the x86 ecosystem, thereby removing single vendor lock-in for system tools development and delivery. Additionally, it supports a guest VM, which is an open KVM environment for running third-party and customized monitoring, troubleshooting, and analytics applications.

Figure 1: The SLX Insight Architecture, inherent in Extreme SLX switches and routers, delivers pervasive visibility in every device for greater insight into network traffic.

Embedded Network Visibility At-A-Glance

Keep network traffic and operations running smoothly with pervasive, real-time network analytics, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

Extreme Networks SLX Insight Architecture

The SLX Insight Architecture delivers dynamic flow identification, intelligent pre-processing, and flexible data streaming capabilities on each router. It can support the following key network operations use cases without disrupting network traffic:

• Real-time monitoring
• Overlay and underlay visibility
• Intelligent automation

Embedded Network Visibility

The SLX 9850 includes the SLX Insight Architecture delivered through SLX-OS and SLX 9850 hardware innovation. This new approach to network monitoring and troubleshooting provides a highly differentiated solution that makes it faster, easier, and more cost-effective to get the comprehensive, real-time visibility needed for network operations and automation. By embedding network visibility on every switch or router, the SLX Insight Architecture can help organizations achieve pervasive visibility throughout the network to quickly and efficiently identify problems, accelerate mean-time-to-resolution, and improve overall service levels.

The highly flexible SLX Insight Architecture enables required data to be extracted from the network and optimized locally on-device for cost-effective delivery offdevice to cloud-scale management, operational intelligence, and automation systems for additional analysis, action, or archiving.

As seen in Figure 1, the key components of the SLX Insight Architecture include:

• Flexible packet filtering: The SLX Insight Architecture begins with flexible packet filtering in the packet processors for each interface. Organizations have access to a rich set of filters for capturing the desired traffic type for visibility processing.
• Guest VM: The SLX Insight Architecture provides an open KVM environment that runs thirdparty applications and customized monitoring, troubleshooting, and analytics tools. Enabled by SLXOS, this preconfigured guest VM is on each SLX 9850 management module. It hosts third-party network operations and analytics applications on every device, extending visibility to the entire network.
• Dedicated analytics path: The SLX Insight Architecture provides an innovative internal analytics path (up to 10 GbE) between the packet processor for the SLX 9850 interface module and the architecture’s open KVM environment running on the SLX 9850 management module. This enables applications running in the open KVM environment to extract data without disrupting the forwarding or control plane traffic of the SLX 9850.
• Flexible streaming: The SLX Insight Architecture provides flexible streaming options, enabling captured data to be delivered to analytics applications off the platform. This includes a dedicated 10 GbE services port on each management module for out-of-band streaming, as well as streaming via any interface module port.
• Dedicated analytics storage: The SLX 9850 provides 256 GB of on-device storage dedicated to the SLX Insight Architecture for applications running in the open KVM environment. This enables real-time data capture for easy and fast access.

Figure 2: Software-driven workflow automation with Extreme Workflow Composer and the Extreme SLX 9850.

Business Agility with Workflow Automation

With DevOps-style automation, the SLX 9850 and Workflow Composer network automation platform help organizations improve business agility and accelerate innovation by automating the entire network lifecycle — from provisioning, validation, and troubleshooting to the remediation of network services. At the same time, these solutions align workflow automation to IT operations and modern DevOps tool chains.

By automating and orchestrating across domains within the services delivery chain, Extreme Workflow Composer connects functional domains—such as the network, compute, storage, and applications—to minimize the number of transitions between functions. This streamlines the delivery of services and infrastructure changes so that they are fast, reliable, and repeatable (see Figure 2). In addition, turnkey automation suites enable organizations to easily deploy Extreme Workflow Composer with SLX switches and routers using a modular, customizable approach, helping to jumpstart the automation journey.

Devops-Style Automation

Improve business agility and accelerate innovation with cross-domain network automation.

SLX 9850 and Workflow Composer
The SLX 9850 combined with Workflow Composer enables automation of the entire network lifecycle with event-driven automation, including:

• Automation for provisioning, validation, troubleshooting, and remediation of network services
• End-to-end IT workflow automation through crossdomain integration
• Customizable or do-it-yourself workflow automation options in multivendor network environments
• DevOps methodologies, open source technologies, and a thriving technical community
• Industry-standard REST/NETCONF-based APIs with Yang models, OpenFlow, scripting languages, and streaming APIs
• Turnkey automation with Workflow Composer Automation Suites for network essentials, IP fabric and IXP workflows, and SLX switches and routers

Extreme Management Center for Insights, Visibility and Control

The SLX family of switches and routers, including SLX 9850 can be managed by Extreme Management Center (XMC). XMC includes a suite of applications, empowering administrators to deliver a superior quality experience to end users through a single pane of glass and a common set of tools to provision, manage and troubleshoot the network. It works across wired and wireless networks, from the edge to the data center and private cloud.

XMC provides a consolidated view of users, devices and applications for wired and wireless networks – from data center to edge. Zero touch provisioning lets one quickly bring new infrastructure online. A granular view of users, devices and applications with an easy to understand dashboard enables efficient inventory and network topology management.

XMC also provides ecosystem integration, includes off the box integrations with major enterprise data center virtual environments such as VMWare, OpenStack and Nutanix to provide VM visibility and enforce security settings. Get more information on Extreme Management Center.

Extreme Global Services

Extreme Global Services has the expertise to help organizations build scalable, efficient cloud infrastructures. Leveraging 20 years of expertise in storage, networking, and virtualization, Extreme Global Services delivers worldclass professional services, technical support, and education services, enabling organizations to maximize their Extreme investments, accelerate new technology deployments, and optimize the performance of networking infrastructures.