Fastrack technology gets cloud solutions business flowing through Brocade vRouters

Infrastructure, cloud and managed services provider Fastrack Technology (Fastrack) is gaining early-mover advantage in the Australian market by becoming one of the first companies to deploy Brocade® Vyatta® vRouter software networking technology as a core component of its data center operations. Fastrack is leveraging the benefits of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to provide a new level of agility and scalable delivery for its Microsoft Azure, cloud, and network solutions.

With a focus on ASX100 and multinational customers, Fastrack competes in a highly challenging and demanding market. Being able to source cost-effective, reliable, and high-performance technology is critical in allowing its business to scale and deliver innovative solutions. The ongoing development of the Brocade Vyatta vRouter platform helps ensure that Fastrack has a clear technology roadmap with investment protection.

"Brocade Vyatta vRouter technology underpins our solutions at a number of our datacenters, and it is essential to have predictable, reliable, and scalable connectivity to provide services into our customers' sites. The core routers from our previous supplier were expensive, unwieldy, and didn't have the right feature set for us," said Yoni Kirsh, managing director of Fastrack Technology.

"Brocade's solution is a huge step forward for us in terms of scalability, agility, and manageability. We now have the ability to provision cloud connectivity for multiple customers within minutes rather than weeks or months. The vRouters also provide us with very granular traffic monitoring and control to ensure we can accurately measure and deliver against our SLAs. Flow accounting also allows us to accurately track network costs for each customer."

The Brocade Vyatta vRouters utilize Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) as virtual machines running on top of hypervisors and industry-standard hardware. They provide advanced routing, stateful firewall, and VPN capabilities with the reliability and performance typically associated with a dedicated hardware networking platform. Fastrack is running BrocadeVyatta 5400 and 5600 vRouters, which deliver linear scalability from commodity hardware that can run either standalone or within a cloud environment, enabling Fastrack to provide its customers with an extremely agile and cost-effective solution.

"Fastrack Technology is one of the first service providers in Australia to replace its core routers with Brocade Vyatta vRouters and integrate the platform as a key component of new solutions," said Gary Denman, regional director for Brocade Australia and New Zealand. "Given the operational agility and economic benefits this provides, both to Fastrack and its cloud solution customers, it is not hard to imagine that other service providers are looking to follow its lead. So I think we will see an industry transformation around NFV over the next few years."

Service providers can use Brocade Vyatta vRouters to transform their static hardware-based networks into dynamic software networks that meet highly virtualized and complex compute, storage, and architecture demands. Multiple processor cores can be dedicated to each interface to achieve line-rate throughput when processing the most demanding workloads, including the smallest packets and intricate firewall rules.

By leveraging the Intel Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), Brocade Vyatta 5600 vRouters achieve more than 10 Gigabits per second of routing performance per processor core, which is orders of magnitude higher than non- DPDK-enabled packet forwarding platforms.