Nortel ERS 5500 Software 6.1 Available

Nortel has released software 6.1for the Ethernet Routing Switch 5500/5600 series. Nortel has also released Java Device Manager 6.20 which provides support for managing switches running the newly released software.

There are a few features that I believe will be worth the effort to upgrade;

• IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) licensing
  IP Flow Information Export functionality is now part of the base functionality of the Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 Series. A separate license for this functionality is no longer necessary.

• Stack forced mode
  When you enable this feature in a stack of two switches, on the failure of a unit, the remaining switch retains the stack IP address ensuring continued management access to the remaining unit. When Stack Forced Mode is enabled if the base unit remains, then AUR, AAUR and DAUR ensures that when a replacement unit is added to the base unit it is correctly provisioned.

There are also a large number of bug fixes which I really won’t go into here. One note of caution, you’ll need to be running software release 6.0 in order to upgrade to software release 6.1, you’ll also need to upgrade the diagnostic agent.

You can find the complete release notes on Nortel’s website.

Cheers!