Designed for use in the Brocade 48000 Director and the Brocade DCX Backbone, the Brocade FR4-18i combines powerful hardware-assisted traffic forwarding for Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) with Fibre Channel switching and routing to enable consolidation, global data mobility, and business continuity.
The blade features sixteen 4 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel ports and two 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports-delivering high performance to run storage applications at line-rate speed with either protocol.
By integrating these services in a single blade, the Brocade FR4-18i offers a wide range of benefits for local and remote storage and SAN connectivity, including long-distance SAN extension, greater resource sharing, and simplified management.
With support for Fast Write, Tape Pipelining, and the industry-unique Brocade Accelerator for FICON, the Brocade FR4-18i provides the industry's most robust solution for Fibre Channel and FICON SAN extension over IP WANs. These capabilities - in conjunction with Brocade Storage-Optimized TCP, hardware-based compression, IPSec encryption, and Adaptive Networking Services - deliver a high-performance, highly reliable, and secure distance-connectivity solution for strategic initiatives such as business continuance, site mirroring, replication, and data migration across virtually unlimited distances.
KEY FEATURES AND BENEFITS
- Provides an enterprise building block for consolidation, global data mobility, and business continuity solutions that improve efficiency and cost savings
- Integrates with the Brocade 48000 Director and Brocade DCX Backbone, enabling new levels of SAN scalability, performance, and investment protection
- Optimizes application performance for Fibre Channel- and FCIP-based SAN extension across distance with features such as Fast Write, the unique Brocade Accelerator for FICON (including Emulation and Read/Write Tape Pipelining), and hardware-based compression
- Maximizes bandwidth utilization with Adaptive Networking Services, including QoS and traffic isolation, trunking, and network load balancing
- Combines FCIP extension with Fibre Channel switching and routing to provide local and remote storage and SAN connectivity while isolating SAN fabrics and IP WAN networks
- Enables secure connections across IP WANs through IPSec encryption
- Simplifies interconnection and support for heterogeneous SAN environments
