Today's IT organizations are looking for ways to make their SAN environments more efficient, secure, and better able to meet their dynamic business requirements. Brocade Virtual Fabrics can play a key role in this search by facilitating more flexible and strategic SAN infrastructures.

Brocade Virtual Fabrics allow IT administrators to logically partition Brocade Fabric OS (FOS) fabrics. This feature is available for use on any fabric running FOS 5.2 and greater, and is backward compatible with fabrics running FOS 5.1 and below. The Virtual Fabrics feature augments the security and fault isolation features of Brocade Advanced Zoning, enabling organizations to create logical groups of separately managed devices, ports, and switches within a physical fabric. Sharing ports and devices between partitions is straightforward and does not require additional licenses.

Virtual Fabrics is implemented using the Brocade Administrative Domain (AD) feature. An AD includes a collection of ports and devices that are managed as a group by SAN administrators who can have varying levels of control For example, an administrator could have full admin, zoning-only, or read-only rights for a particular AD. Each AD has its own zoning database to ensure management and connectivity isolation between Virtual Fabrics.

Sharing a device or port between Virtual Fabrics is as simple as adding it to both ADs. In addition, Fibre Channel Routing (FCR) is fully compatible with Virtual Fabrics since FCR is managed using simple zoning commands that operate normally within ADs. FCR complements Virtual Fabrics by enabling sharing between physical fabrics while Virtual Fabrics can natively share resources between ADs.

• Manage business functions or data separately without duplicating the physical SAN infrastructure
• Implement different permission levels for individual SAN administrators
• Increase levels of data and fault isolation without increasing SAN cost and complexity
• Reduce hardware costs through resource sharing and optimized utilization

Learn more about how Brocade Virtual Fabrics enhance SAN value without altering existing security, scalability, zoning, and management practices.