Brocade continues to build on the virtual router it acquired with Vyatta, announcing today that it's completed an 80-Gb/s benchmark with Telefónica and that it's expanding the router's capabilities with the addition of Layer 3 MPLS support, among other features.

Both items pertain to the Brocade Vyatta 5600, which was announced in September.

The 5600 is descended from the open-source router that Brocade acquired with Vyatta in 2012. It's also a key part of the Brocade Vyatta Platform, a grand scheme that involves the eventual pooling-together of routing, Layer 4-7 services, SDN controllers, and orchestration.

Telefónica had previously noted it's doing lab work with the Brocade platform.

Brocade introduced the 5600 as a 10 Gb/s virtual router, but the joint lab test being announced today produced 80 Gb/s, using one 5600 deployed in one virtual machine on an Intel x86-based server. The server was running a Red Hat KVM environment, and the 5600 was loaded via a memory stick. In other words, the setup wasn't all that exotic.

Brocade is touting the lab results as a benchmark for what's possible in network functions virtualization (NFV) performance. It's a nice milestone for Brocade, but it's also a testimonial to Intel's efforts to make the x86 architecture more suitable for packet processing.

Brocade also announced that the 5600 is due to get some new features in early 2015, including:

• Layer 3 MPLS support, to complement the Layer 3 routing that the 5600 already does
• High-availability for IPv6
• Support for Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol Version 3 (L2TPv3).

Brocade also plans to hook the 5600 to the OpenDaylight platform through use of Netconf and Yang. But you knew that already; it was in this diagram presented in June.