Greater Scalability and Connectivity for Brocade 48000

With a wide range of new enhancements, the Brocade 48000 Director now provides additional capabilities to help solve your mission-critical enterprise SAN requirements. Leveraging new 48-port blade modules, the Brocade 48000 now scales non-disruptively to as many as 384 concurrently active 4 Gbit/sec full-duplex ports in a single domain. As a result, you can implement SAN fabrics capable of supporting thousands of hosts and storage devices. In addition, the Brocade 48000 now gives you options for Fibre Channel routing, Fibre Channel-over-IP (FCIP), and iSCSI connectivity with the Brocade FR4-18i Blade and the new Brocade FC4-16IP Blade.

HIGH AVAILABILITY AND PERFORMANCE

The Brocade 48000 is specifically designed to support environments that require the highest levels of SAN availability and performance. The director includes redundant components, and the ultra-high-availability features of the standard Brocade Fabric OS further improve overall system availability.

The Brocade 48000 is an ideal platform for enterprise SANs that require maximum performance. Each line card slot delivers up to 64 Gbit/sec of bandwidth to front-facing ports. Moreover, local switching enables neighboring director ports to communicate without having to use valuable backplane bandwidth - resulting in lower switching latency and higher port density with full 4 Gbit/sec performance.

To significantly improve your data center's electricity savings and cooling efficiency, the Brocade 48000 delivers this level of performance while using the least resources of any 4 Gbit/sec SAN director.

NEW CONNECTIVITY OPTIONS

To optimize your technology investment, the Brocade 48000 supports Fibre Channel routing, FCIP, and iSCSI connectivity, and is designed for future applications and higher-speed options.

The Brocade 48000 can utilize the Brocade FR4-18i FCIP Blade for a wide variety of tasks, such as interconnecting SAN islands without physically merging them. It also supports the new Brocade FC4-16IP iSCSI Blade, which enables cost-effective Ethernet connectivity so your low-cost servers can access Fibre Channel storage resources.

FICON CAPABILITIES

The Brocade 48000 features the robustness required for the most demanding IT environments. It supports the FICON protocol for IBM mainframe environments on its FC4-16 and FC4-32 blades, giving you the flexibility to run both open systems Fibre Channel and FICON traffic on a port-by-port basis in intermix mode.

Moreover, the Brocade FICON implementation supports 1, 2, and 4 Gbit/sec FICON speeds - along with the Control Unit Port (CUP) in-band management protocol. With N_Port Virtualization (NPIV) technology, the Brocade 48000 also enables the sharing of a single FCP port connected to an FCP channel across multiple operating system images.

Brocade 48000 Highlights

• Delivers industry-leading 4 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel performance
• Scales up to 384 ports in a single domain and 1152 ports in a single rack
• Features options for Fibre Channel routing, FCIP, and iSCSI connectivity

BROCADE FR4-181 BLADE

By deploying the Brocade FR4-18i Blade in the Brocade 48000, you can easily interconnect your SAN islands for greater resource utilization and long-distance extension - without the risk and complexity of physically merging those islands into a single large fabric.

The Brocade FR4-18i combines 4 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel routing with powerful hardware-assisted traffic forwarding for FCIP. The blade features 16 Fibre Channel ports and two 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports. By integrating these services in a single platform, the Brocade FR4-18i offers you a wide range of benefits for inter-SAN connectivity, mixed-vendor SANs, and SAN extension over IP WANs. Brocade FR4-18i Highlights

• Enables secure connections across IP WANs
• Optimizes performance for SAN extension
• Simplifies connectivity in mixed-vendor SAN environments

BROCADE FC4-161P BLADE

By deploying the Brocade FC4-16IP Blade in the Brocade 48000, you can implement a cost-effective way for lower-cost iSCSI servers to access your high-end Fibre Channel SAN resources. The Brocade FC4-16IP features eight Gigabit Ethernet ports for iSCSI connectivity as well as eight 4 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel ports.

Based on the same technology used across the entire Brocade family, the Brocade FC4-16IP provides an easy way to integrate your iSCSI-based devices into your Brocade SAN. With up to four blades in a single Brocade 48000, this enterprise-class iSCSI solution can scale up to support the connectivity of thousands of servers.

Brocade FC4-16IP Highlights

• Integrates iSCSI (Ethernet) servers with Fibre Channel SANs
• Improves storage access to optimize resource utilization and reduce costs
• Extends capabilities such as centralized backup or tape vaulting to servers in DAS environments