Brocade has updated its EnVision Fabric with a new application program interface (API) that essentially instructs the fabric to reduce data by 70 percent. Although Brocade Envision Fabric was initially launched in 2015, the new API just completed its testing phase and is ready for deployment, the company announced last week.

This enhancement is preparation for the high volumes of traffic that 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) will bring to the market, says Sanjay Munshi senior director of product management and marketing with Brocade. And a big challenge that comes with higher traffic is the ability to scale at an effective cost while also reducing latency.

“Mobile operators are spending 50 cents per subscriber to deploy these inline solutions, which is about $2.5 million a year,” Munshi says. “But once that traffic grows, that cost will go up astronomically with the increased number of connected devices.”

Brocade EnVision Fabric is a visibility tool that mobile carriers can use to reduce the amount of data in a network by removing unnecessary data such as duplicate packets. It is also an open system, meaning that it can be deployed in conjunction with existing inline systems that use deep packet inspection (DPI).

Munshi claims that when data can be reduced by 70 percent, a mobile carrier’s cost to scale is cut in half when the fabric is deployed. Additionally, Brocade touts that its fabric can support tens of millions of users compared to hundreds of thousands offered by inline systems.

Because Brocade’s EnVision Fabric is software enabled and network functions virtualization (NFV) compliant, it can provide speed and agility to the network that hardware can’t, the company claims. The fabric rests on Brocade Visibility Manager, which is a piece of software that allows users to manage and orchestrate the whole system using a software-defined networking (SDN) controller.

Munshi says that there are about 30 mobile operators who are spending a vast majority of the total money in this space and claims that ten of the 30 are using Brocade EnVision Fabric.