Brocade Fabric OS, in conjunction with optional Brocade software products, is designed to meet business requirements in the areas of:

• Enhanced Performance
• Fabric Management
• Health and Performance Monitoring
• High Availability
• Security/Access Control

These software offerings form a comprehensive solution for optimizing SAN deployment and management, increasing operational efficiencies, and quickly providing a high return on investment.


Enhanced Performance
Brocade provides key software designed to significantly reduce traffic congestion for increased switch-to-switch performance and enhanced fabric utilization.

Product	Benefits
ISL Trunking	Available for Brocade 2, 4, and 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel switches and directors, Brocade ISL Trunking enhances switch-to-switch performance, simplifies management, and improves the reliability of SANs. It combines up to eight ISLs into a single logical trunk that provides up to 64 Gbit/sec data transfers (with 8 Gbit/sec solutions), enabling higher performance for demanding applications.
Advanced Performance Monitoring	Providing complete resource utilization analysis on a fabric-wide basis, Advanced Performance Monitoring is essential for optimizing fabric performance, maximizing resource utilization, and measuring end-to-end service levels in large SANs.
Brocade Access Gateway	Available on select switches, Brocade Access Gateway is an innovative fabric connectivity solution that eliminates fabric interoperability considerations by directly connecting to any SAN fabric through N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV)-enabled switches.

Fabric Management
To ensure open fabric management, Brocade Fabric OS provides standard management interfaces, a full range of Brocade management tools, and SMI-S support that enables the development of third-party SAN management applications. The following tools greatly simplify SAN fabric management by centralizing control and increase efficiencies by enabling automation of repetitive administrative tasks.

Product	Benefits
Fabric Manager	Using Fabric Manager, administrators can simplify Brocade SAN management and reduce operating costs by configuring, monitoring, and dynamically provisioning multiple Brocade switches and SAN fabrics from a single console. Moreover, administrators can automate common switch and fabric management tasks to further simplify SAN maintenance.
Web Tools	A browser-based application, Web Tools simplifies management by enabling administrators to configure, monitor, and manage individual switches and small SANs from a single access point.

Health and Performance Monitoring
Brocade has developed a full suite of performance and health monitoring tools to help organizations gain better control over their SAN environments. These tools help reduce total cost of ownership and over-provisioning by providing capabilities such as SAN performance tuning, service level agreement reporting, and a wide range of administrator productivity aids.

Product	Benefits
Advanced Performance Monitoring	Providing complete resource utilization analysis on a fabric-wide basis, it is essential for optimizing fabric performance, maximizing resource utilization, and measuring end-to-end service levels in large SANs.
Fabric Watch	The intelligent fabric health monitor for SANs, Fabric Watch enables each switch to constantly watch its SAN fabric for potential faults and automatically alert network managers to problems before they become costly failures. This approach enhances manageability by mitigating the need for multiple, vendor-specific monitoring tools.
SAN Health	Based on the free Brocade SAN Health Diagnostics Capture utility, this family of analysis and reporting solutions inventories fabric components, captures historical performance data, and automatically generates detailed reports and Visio diagrams for an entire SAN environment.

High Availability
Brocade provides the key software and features required to deploy highly available enterprise SAN infrastructures. These SAN infrastructures utilize redundant components, multiple connections, mirroring and clustering techniques, and multiple connections to help organizations achieve maximum business continuance and minimize the risk of costly outages.

Product	Benefits
Extended Fabrics	Extended Fabrics supports long-distance Fibre Channel applications to improve disaster recovery operations and help ensure business continuance.
Fabric Manager	Fabric Manager helps reduce planned and unplanned downtime, accelerates deployment and provisioning, and is essential for managing redundant fabric configurations in mission-critical environments.
ISL Trunking	Combining multiple links between switches to form a single logical ISL with a total bandwidth of up to 64 Gbit/sec (for 8 Gbit/sec solutions), ISL Trunking enhances performance, simplifies management, and improves overall SAN reliability.

Security/Access Control
Because a storage environment is only as secure as its underlying networking foundation, Brocade offers a fabric-based security framework that is impervious to intentional security breaches or inadvertent human error. As a result, organizations can implement security policies at all levels- from basic SAN access to specifying which particular devices are authorized to connect to the SAN.

Product	Benefits
Advanced Zoning	Providing secure access control over fabric resources, Advanced Zoning prevents unauthorized data access, simplifies heterogeneous storage management, segregates storage traffic, maximizes storage capacity, and reduces provisioning time.