Brocade SAN Switches

Brocade SAN switches are designed to meet the performance, availability, scalability, and energy efficiency requirements of organizations managing today's Storage Area Networks (SANs). Backed by Brocade expertise, Brocade switches help organizations optimize storage networking resources to meet the most demanding requirements–ensuring high resource utilization, simplified management, and unmatched fabric scalability.

To get more information on Brocade products, contact us.

Industry-leading Brocade switches are the foundation for connecting servers and storage devices in SANs, enabling organizations to access and share data in a high-performance, manageable, and scalable manner.

Investment Protection
To help protect existing investments, Brocade switches are fully forward and backward compatible across the entire Brocade portfolio, including the Brocade DCX Backbone family. This capability enables organizations to deploy 1, 2, 4, and 8 Gbps fabrics with highly scalable core-to-edge configurations.

Flexible and Easy to Use
Brocade standalone switch models offer flexible configurations ranging from 8 to 80 ports, and can function as core or edge switches, depending upon business requirements. View the Switch Comparison Chart.

With native E_Port interoperability across Brocade Fabric OS (FOS) and M-Enterprise OS (M-EOS) devices and fabrics, Brocade switches connect to the vast majority of fabrics in operation today, allowing organizations to seamlessly integrate and scale their existing SAN infrastructures. Moreover, Brocade switches are backed by FOS and M-EOS engineering, test, and support expertise to provide reliable operation in mixed fabrics.

Brocade Embedded Switches
Blade servers and Fibre Channel SANs maximize the benefits from server consolidation and virtualization. Brocade is the leading provider and innovator of embedded Fibre Channel switches for blade servers. They simplify SAN connectivity, maximize performance and availability, and minimize infrastructure costs.

2, 4, and 8 Gbps embedded switches are available from the following vendors:

• Dell
• Fujitsu Technology Solutions
• Hewlett-Packard
• Hitachi
• IBM
• NEC

ENTRY-LEVEL TO ENTERPRISE-CLASS SWITCHES FOR TODAY'S SANs

High Availability Throughout the Fabric
Brocade switches meet high-availability requirements with the Brocade 5300 and Brocade 5100 switches offering redundant, hot-pluggable components. All Brocade switches feature non-disruptive software upgrades, automatic path rerouting, and extensive diagnostics. Leveraging the Brocade networking model, these switches can provide a fabric capable of delivering overall system availability greater than 99.999 percent.

Affordable Scalability
To meet the need for scalable and affordable SAN solutions, Brocade switches are backward and forward compatible –providing a seamless migration path to 8 Gbps connectivity and future technologies. In addition, support for heterogeneous environments provides much greater flexibility in utilizing existing technology resources. All switches feature flexible port configuration with Ports On Demand capabilities for fast, easy scalability.

Fast, Reliable 2, 4, and 8 Gbps Performance
All Brocade switches offer full, non-blocking performance across all ports as well as 1:1 subscription. Organizations can also experience high performance between switches by using Brocade ISL Trunking to achieve up to 64 Gbps total throughput and innovative Adaptive Networking Services to ensure QoS and optimized data flows.

Simplified Deployment and Management
Brocade switches can utilize cost-effective management solutions to optimize storage network resources, improve efficiency, and reduce TCO. They are designed for easy deployment, management, and maintenance, leveraging tools such as the EZSwitchSetup wizard. In addition, administration is simplified through embedded Brocade Web Tools software and Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM), a comprehensive application for unified data center fabric management. These solutions enable centralized management regardless of vendor, protocol, or geography.

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Excellent Value for a Variety of Environments
Designed for flexibility, Brocade switches provide a low-cost solution for Direct-Attached Storage (DAS)-to-SAN migration, small SAN islands, Network-Attached Storage (NAS) back ends, and the edge of core-to-edge enterprise SANs. As a result, these switches are ideal as standalone departmental SANs or as high-performance edge switches in large enterprise SANs.

Fabric Routing
The Brocade 5100 and 5300 switches support full Fibre Channel routing capabilities with the addition of the Fibre Channel Integrated Routing option. Using built-in routing capabilities, organizations can selectively share devices while still maintaining remote fabric isolation.

Virtual Fabrics
The Brocade 5100 and 5300 switches include a Virtual Fabrics feature that 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.

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CEE/FCoE
The Brocade 8000 Switch delivers Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FcoE) to consolidate server connectivity, which reduces cable clutter, lowers operational costs, and increases power efficiency.

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SAN Extension
Brocade next-generation SAN extension platforms provide best-in-class Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) port density, bandwidth, and throughput to address the most demanding business continuity, compliance, and data mobility requirements for open systems and mainframe storage. They enable organizations to move more data faster and further than ever before for remote data replication, backup, and migration solutions.

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Fabric Encryption
The Brocade Encryption Switch enables the broad application of data-at-rest encryption to help protect information assets and ensure data confidentiality. Brocade provides unmatched performance and value with 96 Gbps of encryption processing power across 32 8 Gbps Fibre Channel ports, seamless installation, and support for DataFort encryption and leading key management systems.

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• Data Sheets

  • Brocade 300 Switch (912.8 KB)

  • Brocade 4 Gbit/Sec ELWL (30 KM) Optical Transceiver (257.7 KB)

  • Brocade 4 Gbit/Sec LWL (10 KM) Optical Transceiver (257.7 KB)

  • Brocade 4 Gbit/Sec LWL (4 KM) Optical Transceiver (257 KB)

  • Brocade 4 Gbit/Sec SWL Optical Transceiver (925.4 KB)

  • Brocade 5100 Switch (1012.4 KB)

  • Brocade 5300 Switch (1.2 MB)

  • Brocade 7500E Extension Switch (1016.9 KB)

  • Brocade 7500 Extension Switch (1042.8 KB)

  • Brocade 8 Gbit/Sec ELWL (25 KM) Optical Transceiver (203.7 KB)

  • Brocade 8 Gbit/Sec LWL (10 KM) Optical Transceiver (258 KB)

  • Brocade 8 Gbit/Sec SWL Optical Transceiver (926.1 KB)

  • Brocade Access Gateway for the Brocade 200E (187.7 KB)

  • Brocade Advanced Performance Monitoring (172.9 KB)

  • Brocade DCFM (1.6 MB)

  • Brocade Encryption Switch (1.2 MB)

  • Brocade Enterprise OS 8.0 (185 KB)

  • Brocade Extended Fabrics (154.7 KB)

  • Brocade Fabric Watch (169 KB)

  • Brocade Inter-Switch Link Trunking (201.7 KB)

  • Brocade Web Tools (2.3 MB)

• FAQs

  • Brocade 200E FAQ (74.6 KB)

  • Brocade 8000 Switch FAQ (67.1 KB)

  • Brocade 815/825 and 415/425 Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters FAQ (73.5 KB)

  • Brocade 8 Gbit/Sec SAN Switch FAQ (83.5 KB)

  • Brocade Accelerator for FICON FAQ (65.5 KB)

  • Brocade Gbit/sec SAN Switch FAQ (66.5 KB)

  • Brocade SAN Health Utility FAQ (1074.7 KB)

• Matrices

  • Brocade Fabric OS Features Summary (954.8 KB)

  • Brocade Fabric OS Product Line Guide (2.9 MB)

  • Brocade M-Series Products Fabric Guidelines (250.9 KB)

  • OPENready Product Compatibility Matrice (654.1 KB)

  • Transceiver Platform Support Matrix (342.8 KB)

• Success Stories

  • California Franchise Tax Board: Getting Big Returns Storing Tax Data with Brocade SANs (169.8 KB)

  • Nikkei: Logically Consolidate Brocade SANs for Greater Efficiency and Security (199.3 KB)

  • Rackspace Managed Hosting: Bolstering a SAN for a New Generation of Growth (168.9 KB)

• Technical Briefs

  • Connecting Servers in a DMZ to a Fibre Channel SAN (362.7 KB)

  • Corning Cable Systems Optical Cabling Solutions for Brocade (1009.7 KB)

  • Data-at-Rest Encryption Solutions (1.4 MB)

  • Optimizing Data Center Consolidation with Server Virtualization (269.6 KB)

  • Why Fibre Channel over Ethernet? (240.9 KB)

• White Papers

  • Brocade FCoE Solutions for Server I/O Convergence (449.1 KB)

  • Native Fabric Connectivity for Today's SANs (337.3 KB)

  • The Growing Need for Security in Storage Area Networks (776.4 KB)

  • Why Switch FICON? Switched FICON vs Direct Attached FICON (252.5 KB)