Advanced Fabric Services

Brocade Advanced Fabric Services help organizations get the most value from their data center fabrics. These specialized services enable IT organizations to monitor their fabrics for potential faults, limit data access to authorized individuals, better support business continuity operations, increase performance, and much more.

As a result, these services provide a wide range of capabilities to enable highly available, flexible, secure, high-performance, and easily managed data center fabrics that address the most demanding business requirements.

Brocade Advanced Performance Monitoring
Advanced Performance Monitoring (available on all 2,4, and 8 Gbit/sec Brocade switches,directors, and backbone products) can monitor performance characteristics on any attribute within the first 64 bytes of a Fibre Channel frame. Predefined graphs measure end-to-end performance; port, switch, and AL-PA bandwidth utilization; SCSI commands (read, write, and read/write); and protocol comparisons (SCSI versus IP). As a result, this tool provides the foundation for performance tuning, resource optimization, service level agreement compliance reporting, and bill-back applications.

Brocade Advanced Zoning Service
Advanced Zoning software limits access to data by segmenting a fabric into virtual private SANs. Available on 2, 4, and 8 Gbit/sec Brocade switches, directors, and backbone products, software-enforced zoning prevents hosts from discovering unauthorized target devices. Hardware-enforced zoning prevents a host from accessing a device it is not authorized to access. In addition, Advanced Zoning enables hardware enforcement for devices identified by World Wide Name (WWN). Zone enforcement is adjusted automatically, even if a device moves to another port. Another key advantage is simplified configuration of Fibre Channel Routing, traffic isolation, and Quality of Service (QoS) options. The same tool used to control device access is also used to configure these value-added features.

Brocade Extended Fabrics
Extended Fabrics software enables ISLs at distances up to 120 kilometers over dark fiber or Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) connections at full bandwidth. As a result, it helps support disaster recovery and business continuity operations.

Brocade Fabric Watch
An intelligent monitor for Brocade fabrics, Fabric Watch enables each switch to constantly watch its 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.

Brocade ISL Trunking
Available for Brocade 2, 4, and 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel switches and directors, Brocade Inter-Switch Link (ISL) Trunking enhances switch-to-switch performance, simplifies management, and improves the reliability of data center fabrics. It combines up to eight ISLs into a single logical trunk that provides up to 64 Gbit/sec data transfers (with 8 Gbit/sec switches), enabling higher performance for demanding applications.

Brocade Inter-Chassis Links
Available for the Brocade DCX Backbone family, Inter-Chassis Links (ICLs) provide high-performance links between two Brocade DCX chassis. This enables very high density (up to 768 ports) as well as high-performance (8 Gbit/sec) connectivity at the core of the fabric. Moreover, ICLs do not consume any of the Brocade DCX ports used for device connectivity. Instead, four purpose-built cables simply attach two Brocade DCX chassis, delivering 1 Tbit/sec of connectivity that is equal to the entire switching capacity of most current director products.

Brocade Fabric-Based Encryption
Brocade high-performance fabric-based encryption services for data-at-rest support non-intrusive deployment into both Brocade FOS and M-EOS fabrics, providing unmatched processing power starting at 48 Gbit/sec (and increasing up to 96 Gbit/sec). Moreover, the services seamlessly integrate with industry-leading key management systems for a holistic encryption solution. The services are available on the standalone 32-port 8 Gbit/sec Brocade Encryption Switch and the 16-port 8 Gbit/sec Brocade FS8-18 Encryption Blade for the Brocade DCX Backbone family.

Learn More

• Data Sheets

  • Brocade Advanced Performance Monitoring (622.8 KB)

  • Brocade Extended Fabrics (570.7 KB)

  • Brocade Fabric Watch (773.4 KB)

  • Inter Switch-Link Trunking (536.5 KB)

• Matrices

  • Brocade Fabric OS Features Summary (1004 KB)