Breakthrough performance and Adaptive Networking capabilities provide powerful new capabilities for your enterprise data center.

As you look for ways to manage larger amounts of data and implement cost-saving strategies such as consolidation and virtualization, you need an IT infrastructure built for growth and flexibility. To help you maximize SAN performance and scalability, Brocade has introduced a new family of 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel switches and 8 Gbit/sec Host Bus Adapters (HBAs).

As part of the strategic Brocade Data Center Fabric (DCF) architecture, these new product offerings give you flexible infrastructure options to deliver service levels that keep data flowing to the systems and virtual servers that need it.

Combined with a wide range of capabilities in the new Brocade Fabric OS 6.1 release, these offerings play a vital role in enabling strategic business objectives such as data center consolidation and virtualization.

The new family of Brocade 8 Gbit/sec SAN switches significantly increases performance, scalability, and energy efficiency over previous switches. Based on sixth-generation Brocade ASICs, these switches are backward compatible with all Brocade switches, directors, and the Brocade DCX Backbone. Moreover, they provide native connectivity to M-Series (McDATA) switches and directors.

In addition to providing greater speed, advanced traffic management capabilities, and industry-leading extended distance support, these new switches continue the Brocade tradition of providing excellent investment protection, ease of use, and flexibility.

The new switches include:

• Brocade 300: A 1U switch with 8, 16, or 24 ports - providing an affordable entry-level solution for small SANs or the edge of larger SANs. It also supports Brocade Access Gateway mode.
• Brocade 5100: A 1U switch with 24, 32, or 40 ports - providing a flexible building block for the widest range of SAN environments. It supports FICON connectivity and Fibre Channel Integrated Routing to connect switches in different fabrics.
• Brocade 5300: A 2U switch with 48, 64, or 80 ports - providing superior performance and port density for the most demanding enterprise SAN environments. It supports FICON connectivity and Fibre Channel Integrated Routing to connect switches in different fabrics.

All of these switches provide:

• Industry-leading 8 Gbit/sec performance with all ports supporting 4 Gbit/sec or 8 Gbit/sec SFPs and auto-negotiating 1, 2, 4, and 8 Gbit/sec connections
• Up to 50 percent more port density than previous switches, with familiar Ports On Demand capabilities so you can activate additional ports only when you need them
• Industry-leading energy efficiency that reduces power consumption, cooling needs, and carbon emissions for greater cost savings
• Adaptive Networking services, including Quality of Service (QoS) for differentiated service levels in the fabric
• Ease of use via the EZSwitchSetup Wizard, which allows you to configure, deploy, and manage switches through a single point-and-click GUI

As your data center becomes increasingly virtualized, you need high-performance server connectivity solutions that also support simplified, end-to-end data center management. To help you meet this need, Brocade has introduced a new family of Fibre Channel HBAs that deliver highly reliable enterprise-class server connectivity in a variety of configurations.

The new HBAs include:

• Brocade 815: Single-port 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel to PCI HBA
• Brocade 825: Dual-port 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel to PCI HBA
• Brocade 415: Single-port 4 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel to PCI HBA
• Brocade 425: Dual-port 4 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel to PCI HBA

These HBAs are also designed to support 10 Gigabit Ethernet, CEE, FCoE, HPC, and iSCSI protocols in the future. As a result, they provide a powerful foundation to increase server and storage resource utilization while simplifying provisioning, management, and fault isolation.

Key benefits include:

• Performance and power efficiency with up to 1 million IOPS per port and 3200 MB/sec of throughput (up to 1600 MB/sec of throughput for 4 Gbit/sec HBAs)
• Greater virtualization mobility with end-to-end management features extended from the fabric all the way to virtual servers
• QoS for dedicated bandwidth and guaranteed service levels for virtual applications
• Higher security with Fibre Channel Security Protocol (FC-SP) to prevent unauthorized access and a hardware-based encryption engine (AES-GCM) to protect in-flight data
• Unified SAN management with Brocade Host Connectivity Manager (HCM), a single tool that simplifies HBA installation, configuration, and management

The new switches and HBAs work in environments utilizing the latest release of Brocade Fabric OS (FOS 6.1), which is designed to:

• Simplify SAN configuration in blade server and Brocade 300 environments with Brocade Access Gateway enhancements
• Extend native connectivity to M-Series solutions for both open systems and System z mainframe environments
• Support Fibre Channel Integrated Routing and industry-leading extension capabilities between fabrics
• Provide Adaptive Networking capabilities to ensure the highest service levels for mission-critical data center applications
• Increase network security with Traffic Isolation Zones over Fibre Channel Routing
• Support temporary licenses to activate optional features for up to 45 days