IBM Europe, Middle East, and Africa
Hardware Announcement ZG09-0217
IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation
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Designed to enable reliable converged infrastructures and support mission-critical
applications, IBM Ethernet Router m-series routers feature advanced n+1 redundant
switch fabric architecture for high availability. The architecture is designed to help
the system to operate at peak performance even in the case of a switch fabric
card failure. In the case of fabric failures, this advanced architecture can allow
the system to continue to operate in a graceful degradation mode where the
system tunes its performance to the remaining fabric capacity. The redundant
fabric architecture is complemented by hardware redundancy for the management
modules, power supplies, and cooling system. In addition, the Multi-Service
IronWare operating system offers hitless management failover with Border Gateway
Protocol (BGP) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) graceful restart capabilities,
as well as hitless (in-service) software upgrades for further enhancing both system
availability and overall network availability.
A suite of advanced traffic management and quality of service (QoS) functions
supports the deployment of triple-play service provider networks and converged
enterprise networks supporting voice, video, and data. IBM Ethernet Router m-
series routers offer advanced bandwidth control capabilities providing committed
bandwidth to users or applications. These switching routers also offer advanced
packet marking, prioritization, queuing, and scheduling with Weighted Random
Early Discard (WRED) congestion management for granular control of bandwidth
utilization throughout the network.
IBM Ethernet Router m-series routers offer network planners high-performance
IPv4, IPv6, MPLS, and Multi-VRF capabilities along with Layer 2 switching
capabilities, which can help address the diverse needs of environments ranging
from metro networks, ISPs, data centers, large enterprises, government networks,
education and research, and high performance computing (HPC).
IBM Ethernet Router m-series routers offer a suite of Layer 2 Metro Ethernet
technologies for today's metropolitan service providers. The IBM Ethernet Router
m-series enables advanced Layer 2 Metro Ethernet services based on IEEE 802.1Q,
Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP), Metro Ring Protocol (MRP), and Virtual Switch
Redundancy Protocol (VSRP). The IBM Ethernet Router m-series offers unique
scalability for Layer 2 metro applications with a capacity of up to 1 million MAC
addresses per system.
Complementing the Layer 2 Metro Ethernet capabilities is a powerful suite of MPLS
capabilities and services, including MPLS-TE, Fast Reroute (FRR), MPLS Virtual
Leased Line (VLL), Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), and BGP/MPLS VPNs (MPLS
L3VPNs). This unique combination of advanced services allows operators to combine
the simplicity and cost-efficiency of Layer 2 Ethernet with the granular control
and high availability of MPLS. In addition, this rich set of Layer 2 and MPLS-based
capabilities facilitates the creation of scalable resilient services compliant with the
Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) specifications for Ethernet Private Line (EPL), Ethernet
Virtual Private Line (EVPL), and Ethernet LAN (E-LAN).
For Internet edge and aggregation routing, IBM Ethernet Router m-series routers
offer operators secure and robust routing with dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 wire-
speed routing performance. These switching routers offer capacities up to 512,000
IPv4 routes in the hardware Forwarding Information Based (FIB), and up to 1
million BGP routes in the BGP Routing Information Base (RIB), thereby enabling
high-performance, scalable, and cost-effective Internet edge and aggregation
deployments.
IBM Ethernet Router m-series routers are a powerful enabler of advanced converged
enterprise backbones. Featuring state-of-the-art QoS and wire-speed unicast and
multicast routing for IPv4 and IPv6, the routers can help enable the efficient rollout
of converged backbones, providing reliable transport of VoIP, video services, and
mission-critical data. Virtual routing via Multi-VRF allows enterprises to create
multiple security zones and simplified VPNs for different applications and business
units, while streamlining overall network management. Additionally, the router's
intrinsic wire speed sFlow capability provides scalable network-wide monitoring of
flows for enhancing security via malicious traffic detection and intrusion detection,
as well as for proactive management of network bandwidth through traffic trend
