October 19, September 15, September 16, Your email address will not be published. Key benefits of Access Gateway mode include:. Figure 1. A Brocade SAN-based consolidation solution can significantly improve data availability and resource utilization. These high-performance, highly reliable Fibre Channel switches address a wide range of business requirements for small shared storage environments all the way up to the most demanding enterprise data centers.
What does the Brocade switch family consist of and what are the new capabilities? These new switches provide:. Top Talkers is available through the Advanced Performance Monitoring license. The key advantages are performance, scalability, Adaptive Networking capabilities, investment protection, ease of use, interoperability, and energy efficiency. Deploying 8 Gbps performance along with intelligent management features can provide an extra generation's worth of use from a storage network.
Brocade explains the Brocade data center architecture and the importance of Adaptive Networking in the Technical Briefs section located at www. The latest-generation Brocade ASICs provide 8 Gbps transfer rates, increased port density, greater bandwidth, and virtual channel technology supporting Adaptive Networking.
As with all Brocade products, however, the new Brocade , Brocade , and Brocade switches are backward-compatible with earlier Brocade switches, directors, and backbone-class products to protect existing investments. Yes, in both native and open mode. As a result, organizations can protect and leverage their M-Series investments. Who is the target market and what are the expectations for 8 Gbps switch adoption?
This frees up ports for server and storage connections while doubling the bandwidth between switch connections for greater scalability. Brocade also anticipates fast adoption rates in growing virtual server environments. As organizations continue to capitalize on the cost savings of virtualization by adding more virtual machines per host 20, 30, or 40 and by running tier-1 applications, they will eventually reach 4 Gbps capacity and incur over-subscription.
System z environments and high-bandwidth applications such as backup are also driving demand for 8 Gbps speed. By delivering 8 Gbps performance across switch, director, and backbone-class products, Brocade provides a capability in the fabric to accelerate market development of 8 Gbps HBAs, RAID systems, and tape devices.
They provide building blocks for this architecture, incorporating advanced features for end-to-end performance, availability, extension, monitoring, and reporting.
For organizations that are building smaller SANs, fewer highly reliable switches means lower capital and management costs. For organizations expanding the server edge in large data centers, higher server density requires more switch ports and greater speed per port. Access Gateway further simplifies fabric configuration and increases scalability. Cisco says there's no market demand for 8 Gbps switches. Isn't this an indication that there is no need?
It is likely more an indication of the challenges Cisco faces in keeping up with the pace of innovation and bringing 8 Gbps to market across an entire product line. Cisco does not seem to fully understand enterprise requirements for performance and scalability in data center networks to achieve greater consolidation, virtualization, protection, and application performance.
How much do the 8 Gbps switches cost? Isn't 8 Gbps performance overly expensive? Pricing for 8 Gbps switch configurations is available from Brocade Partners.
This allows them to align cost and performance with their current needs, then scale cost-effectively as their server and storage needs grow. Integrated Routing eliminates the need for a dedicated router or consumption of chassis slots with special routing blades—thereby reducing cost, complexity, and management overhead.
Are there feature differences or performance advantages with Integrated Routing compared to an extension switch or an extension blade? The main advantages of Integrated Routing are lower cost, complexity, and administration overhead. Brocade Access Gateway mode can make a switch appear transparent to hosts or the network fabric. This allows more hosts and virtual machines to access the fabric without increasing the size of the Fibre Channel fabric—thereby simplifying configuration and reducing the number of Domain IDs to manage.
Fabric OS 6. It also brings Access Gateway mode to the Brocade Virtual Fabrics enables the partitioning of a physical SAN into logical fabrics. This provides fabric isolation by application, business group, customer, or traffic type without sacrificing performance, scalability, security, or reliability. Virtual Fabrics is supported on both the Brocade and Brocade Access Gateway mode enables the Brocade VAFC to support rapidly growing server environments by not requiring any switch configuration during deployment.
Some emerging large-scale server solutions for data center deployments, such as the IBM iDataPlex and Verari BladeRack, have specific requirements for network switches due to their compact rack designs. Brocade Web Tools Management. Brocade Web Tools Zoning. The Brocade switch incorporates two technologies intended to simplify two distinct deployment scenarios. The Brocade EZSwitchSetup wizard streamlines initial configuration as well as ongoing management for a single-switch fabric with only Fibre Channel ports.
Dynamic Fabric Provisioning DFP allows organizations to eliminate fabric reconfiguration when adding or replacing servers by virtualizing host World Wide Names WWNs when Brocade switches are used in conjunction with Brocade adapters in the host.
Brocade Web Tools Port Management. When licensed with a full 48 ports, the supports configuration as a Brocade Access Gateway in order to simply SAN management by reducing the number of domain IDs in a fabric. When used in AG mode, the becomes logically transparent to the host and the fabric, allowing a larger number of hosts without increased switch management overhead.
Virtual Fabrics enable administrators to create logical groups of separately managed fabrics, devices, ports, and switches within a physical SAN. Logical switches also provide a way to simplify storage charge-back by customer, department, or application and do not need to be enabled on every switch in a SAN. Optional in-flight compression optimizes network performance and can be used in conjunction with in-flight encryption.
Data-at-rest encryption encrypts the data so that it is stored on the destination storage media in an encrypted form. Fibre Channel natively provides the capability to connections up to 30 km using enhanced long-wave optics and dark fiber.
The Brocade can provide 16 Gbps links up to km, with each attached device appearing as a local SAN device. All management traffic similarly flows through internal SAN connections, meaning that the entire fabric can be managed from a single administrator console using Brocade Network Advisor without extensive configuration.
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