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Powerful New Extension Solutions for Business Continuity

Are you looking for ways to streamline data replication and backups, improve time to recovery, and reduce the risk (and costs) of business downtime? Brocade can help you meet these challenges with new SAN extension platforms designed for a wide range of business continuity and data recovery initiatives.

Deploying a faster, more reliable, and more scalable network infrastructure that leverages your existing WANs can help you protect critical applications and data in the most cost-effective way possible. In addition, Brocade offers new SAN management options to help you manage your extended SAN environment.

These new extension and management solutions include:

  • The Brocade 7800 Extension Switch
  • The Brocade FX8-24 Extension Blade for Brocade DCX Backbones
  • Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM) Professional Plus
  • Bottleneck Detection with Brocade Fabric OS 6.3

New SAN Extension Solutions for Data Center-to-Data Center Connectivity
As you build or expand your SAN extension infrastructure, two next-generation extension platforms give you new options for supporting tasks such as remote data replication, backup, and migration. Available in a standalone switch or blade format, these solutions provide best-in-class Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) port density, bandwidth, and throughput to meet your most demanding business continuity, compliance, and data mobility requirements.

By combining leading-edge performance and "pay-as-you-grow" scalability, these solutions give you flexible deployment options for your data centers and remote offices alike. Utilizing cost-effective IP WAN transport, you can move more data faster over distances that would otherwise be impossible, impractical, or too expensive with standard Fibre Channel connections.

Your Choice: A Standalone Switch or Blade Format
The standalone Brocade 7800 Extension Switch provides up to sixteen 8 Gbps Fibre Channel ports and six 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports, delivering aggregate bandwidth of up to 128 Gbps for Fibre Channel and up to 6 Gbps for FCIP. This unmatched bandwidth, port density, and throughput help maximize application performance over WAN links to support a robust business continuity solution.

The Brocade 7800 is available in two configurations:

  • The Brocade 7800 16/6 Extension Switch for larger data centers and multisite enterprises with open systems and mainframe environments
  • The Brocade 7800 4/2 Extension Switch for smaller data centers and remote offices with open systems environments (this model can be upgraded to the Brocade 7800 16/6 via a software license)

In larger enterprises built on the Brocade DCX or DCX-4S Backbone, you can utilize the Brocade FX8-24 Extension Blade, which delivers aggregate bandwidth of up to 96 Gbps for Fibre Channel and up to 20 Gbps for FCIP. The blade features twelve 8 Gbps Fibre Channel ports, ten 1 GbE ports, and up to two optional 10 GbE ports. Two Brocade FX8-24 blades can fit into a Brocade DCX or DCX-4S Backbone, supporting the most demanding enterprise environments.

You can deploy the Brocade FX8-24 and Brocade 7800 together as part of a data center-to-edge architecture. This approach gives you a flexible, cost-effective way to connect your primary data centers with remote data centers and offices. Both platforms offer key new features such as FCIP Trunking to maximize FCIP tunnel bandwidth and WAN link resiliency, and Adaptive Rate Limiting to maximize bandwidth utilization.

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Unified Management with Brocade DCFM
To provide additional options for unified fabric management, Brocade now offers DCFM Professional Plus, which is specifically designed for midsized enterprises or departments within large organizations. Featuring enterprise-class capabilities and advanced features, DCFM Professional Plus unifies the management of up to four Brocade Fabric OS (FOS), M-Enterprise OS (M-EOS), or mixed fabrics through a single pane of glass.

This flexibility helps simplify SAN extension management with a comprehensive view of the extension infrastructure, an intuitive FCIP tunnel configuration dialog, and robust monitoring capabilities. Using these features, you can configure, monitor, and optimize FCIP tunnels across WAN links that connect to the new Brocade 7800 and Brocade FX8-24 extension solutions.

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New Bottleneck Detection Capability
With Fabric OS 6.3, you can now utilize the new Bottleneck Detection capability available with Brocade Advanced Performance Monitoring. Bottleneck Detection identifies and alerts you about "slow-drain" storage devices that can cause latency and I/O timeouts. This capability is particularly valuable for optimizing performance in highly virtualized server environments.