Residing at the core of the Brocade Data Center Fabric (DCF) architecture, the Brocade DCX Backbone is a new and highly robust class of network infrastructure that supports both open systems and mainframe environments. Designed to meet a wide range of technology challenges for evolving enterprise data centers, the Brocade DCX combines breakthrough performance, scalability, and energy efficiency with long-term investment protection.

To support growing server and storage environments and to facilitate virtualization, the Brocade DCX delivers over four times the bandwidth of industry-leading Brocade SAN directors. Using 4 Gbit/sec or 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel SFPs, a single chassis provides up to 384 Fibre Channel ports. Four Inter-Chassis Link (ICL) ports are used to connect two Brocade DCX chassis and preserve the equivalent of up to 128 8 Gbit/sec E_Ports for server and storage connectivity.

The Brocade DCX offers flexible management capabilities as well as Adaptive Networking services and fabric-based applications to help optimize network and application performance. To minimize risk and costly downtime, the platform leverages the proven five-nines reliability of hundreds of thousands of Brocade SAN deployments.

The Brocade DCX facilitates the consolidation of server-to-server, server-to-storage, and storage-to-storage networks with highly available, lossless connectivity. In addition, it operates natively with Brocade and Brocade M-Series components, extending SAN investments for maximum ROI. And it’s future-built to support a broad range of current and emerging network protocols to form a unified, high-performance data center fabric.

Industry-leading Capabilities for Large Enterprises
Industry-leading Performance	8 Gbit/sec per-port, full-line-rate performance 13 Tbit/sec aggregate dual-chassis bandwidth (6.5 Tbit/sec for a single chassis) 1 Tbit/sec of aggregate ICL bandwidth More than five times the performance of competitive offerings
High Scalability	High-density, bladed architecture Up to 384 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel ports in a single chassis Up to 768 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel ports in a dual-chassis configuration 544 Gbit/sec aggregate bandwidth per slot plus local switching Fibre Channel Integrated Routing Specialty blades for 10 Gbit/sec connectivity, Fibre Channel Routing over IP, and fabric-based applications
Energy Efficiency	Less than one-half Watt per Gbit/sec Ten times more energy-efficient than competitive offerings
Ultra-High Availability	Designed to support 99.999% uptime Passive backplane, separate and redundant control processor and core switching blades Hot-pluggable components, including redundant power supplies, fans, WWN cards, blades, and optics
Fabric Services and Applications	Adaptive Networking services, including Quality of Service (QoS), Ingress Rate Limiting, Traffic Isolation, and Top Talkers Plug-in services for fabric-based storage virtualization, continuous data protection and replication, and online data migration
Multiprotocol Capabilities and Fabric Interoperability	Support for Fibre Channel, FICON, FCIP, and IPFC Designed for future 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) Native connectivity in Brocade and Brocade M-Series fabrics, including backward and forward compatibility
Intelligent Management and Monitoring	Full utilization of the Brocade Fabric OS embedded operating system Flexibility to utilize a command line interface, Brocade EFCM, Brocade Fabric Manager, Brocade Advanced Web Tools, and Brocade Advanced Performance Monitoring Integration with third-party management tools