UNIFIED MANAGEMENT
Brocade DCFM enables organizations to simultaneously monitor and manage multiple CNAs—along with Brocade HBAs, switches, directors, and backbones—from a single, centralized location. By leveraging Brocade DCFM, organizations can apply a holistic approach to data center management in both physical and virtual environments.

Brocade CNAs enable Virtual Machine (VM) discovery in VMware ESX environments within Brocade DCFM. VM discovery provides an end-to-end view of the VM-to-LUN path information for all the VMs running on each physical server. This provides unprecedented levels of visibility into the virtual server infrastructure, enabling network administrators to more efficiently manage their storage network resources.

CNA management and VM visibility features are available in all three editions of Brocade DCFM: Professional, Professional Plus, and Enterprise. For simple device configuration, driver updates, or to obtain CNA and port statistics, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) element manager—Brocade Host Connectivity Manager (HCM)—and a Command Line Interface (CLI) are also available. Both Brocade DCFM and HCM provide open APIs and standards-based interfaces for integration with popular third-party applications and higher-level frameworks to help orchestrate Brocade hardware and network services.

Figure 1. Brocade DCFM provides unified management of network and
server connectivity resources with end-to-end VM visibility.

UNMATCHED PERFORMANCE
The explosive growth of server virtualization and high-bandwidth applications, such as video-on-demand and High Performance Computing (HPC), are leading to increased performance demands, making 10 Gbps connectivity a key requirement. Recent advances in server technology, including Intel Nehalem processors, now enable servers to run more workloads, increasing consolidation and virtualization ratios. With more VMs deployed per server, network bandwidth and storage I/O requirements are higher than ever before.

Brocade CNAs are fully featured 10 GbE NICs that deliver 10 Gbps line rate performance per port. They provide stateless networking offloads such as TCP checksum and segmentation offloads for improved performance and more efficient CPU usage. Additional CPU cycles can then be dedicated for additional application processing.

Brocade CNAs deliver full hardware-based FCoE offload to provide superior performance for storage applications, with up to twice the performance of competitive offerings in real-world application scenarios.

     
Figure 2. Brocade CNAs can provide twice the performance of competitive offerings in real-world application scenarios.

Ultimately, this means that businesses of all sizes can scale their virtual server deployments and virtualize highly demanding applications with greater confidence, resulting in better server resource utilization and lower capital and operational costs.

OPTIMIZED FOR VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS
In non-virtualized environments, applications are tied to physical servers, which in turn connect to physical switch ports in a "static" manner. Applying network policies or monitoring application performance is simple because the applications are permanently associated with the physical ports.

With server virtualization, multiple applications share a physical switch port. Furthermore, applications can move across the virtualized server infrastructure based on a number of user-defined policies and in response to dynamic business requirements. Virtualization hypervisors implement virtual switching technologies to connect the VMs to the network, and to move data between VMs.

Virtual Machine Optimized Ports (VMOPs) offload the hypervisor of essential virtual switching tasks, such as incoming packet classification and sorting tasks, helping to reduce latency and improve throughput while freeing CPU cycles that can be used to further scale an organization's virtualization environment.

Brocade CNAs support N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) with up to 255 virtual ports, and are qualified with all major hypervisor solutions in the industry. Leveraging NPIV technology, organizations can extend Brocade fabric services to the server and all the way to the VM and application level.