News

posted on 13 May 2008 14:35

Brocade has announced a line of 8Gbit/s HBAs and switches and extended its virtual channel, guaranteeing quality of service  (QoS) levels, from the switches to the HBAs. This helps the movement of VMware virtual servers across physical servers and HBAs because SAN access QoS is preserved.

The new line of switches and HBAs doubles the speed of the previous 4Gbit/s products and are backwards-compatible with Brocade's previous 1, 2 and 4Gbit/s storage area network (SAN) products, including McDATA devices.

The switches have full 8Gbits/s non-contested ports. The 300 has from 8 to 24 ports in increments of 8 ports at a time. The 5100 has 24 to 48 ports whilst the 5300 enterprise switch has 48 to 80 ports. Each switch runs the latest version of Brocade's fabric O/S providing full end-to-end management of SAN connectivity from serverrs to storage devices.

It provides adaptive networking services that enable administrators to define QoS levels for things such as bandwidth and priority, manage SAN traffic and carry out dynamic traffic profiling. Simon Pamplin, Brocade's systems engineering manager for the UK and Ireland, said, "You can isolate traffic to go through certain switch ports. It's built on the industry-standard concept of zones."

The fabric OS has, in effect, been extended out to the new HBAs and these now represent the start point for virtual channels through the SAN. The net result is that virtual machines (VMs) in a physical server can have SAN QoS defined for them and, if they have to be moved, from physical HBA to physical HBA or from physical server to physical server, their virtual channel moves with them as the destination HBA becomes the new port into the same virtual channel.

How does this differ from Emulex and QLogic virtual HBA capabilities, allowing several VMs to share one physical HBA? Pamplin said: "Emulex and QLogic use the (Cisco) Nuova ASIC which has no virtual channel capability."

It has been known that Brocade is entering the HBA market and people have wondered how Brocade will differentiate its HBAs from those of Emulex and Cisco. The virtual channel capability is the answer, with Pamplin saying: "We're not in the market to make HBAs. It's more of an intelligent server adapter."

The new products fit naturally into Brocade's DCF (Data Center Fabric) architecture.

As well as doubling speed the switches also improve power efficiency by 40 percent.

The new 8 Gbit/s HBA line, supporting up to 500,000 IOPS per port, consists of:-

- 815: Single-port 8 Gbit/s Fibre Channel to PCI HBA
- 825: Dual-port 8 Gbit/s Fibre Channel to PCI HBA (pictured above)

Brocade is also delivering a new and unified management tool that spans its new switches and HBAs to simplify the management of a data center's infrastructure. The new 8Gbit/s switches are available from Brocade, IBM and Sun now with other Brocade OEMs having them available within the next few months. The new HBAs will be generally available in June.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}