Thanks, Ed F., is a pretty smart guy. Wonder what BRCD has ready for the fall meeting line-up?
BROCADE FABRIC OS
FEATURES
On June 26, 2000 Brocade announced feature enhance-ments
to the Brocade Fabric Operating System. The
enhancements provide several valuable features and ca-pabilities
for customers implementing a SAN infrastruc-ture.
The new features are:
· Fabric Watch is a monitor option for SANs that
are connected using Brocade switches. With this
feature, the Brocade switch can monitor the SAN
for potential faults and alert designated administra-tors
of the condition. The conditions monitored are
zoning changes in switches, new logins, port state
transitions, transmission or hardware errors, traffic
for different port classes, and environmental condi-tions
within the switch. Being able to monitor the
conditions within a SAN provides for the capabil-ity
for both human-based actions and policy
driven controls. One example would be protection
from the attachment of a rogue server to a SAN.
The state change condition could be detected and
the port that the rogue server was attached to
could be “zoned out” where it was put in its own
zone without access to any other port (and re-sources)
until an administrative person could take
action based on understanding the configuration
change involved. The monitoring also allows for
more pro-active maintenance and support strate-gies.
With the configurable and customizable
monitoring, more sophisticated controls of a SAN
are possible.
· Extended Fabrics are changes to the buffering al-location
and credit handling to allow full fabric
connectivity at distances of up to 100KM with us-age
of qualified GBICs. This capability enables ex-tended
distance SANs at full SAN functionality.
The ability to connect SANs at distances of 100KM
is a remarkable achievement. It also dramatically
changes the SAN landscape in that the campus en-vironment
can now be 62 miles. The GBICs util-ized
in the Brocade switch must be capable of driv-ing
the light signal that distance. As of this time,
the Cielo and Finisar GBICs have been qualified.
Brocade has a major customer that has implemented
the Extended Fabrics support and has realized a
sustained data rate of 90MB/s at 100KM
The change in the buffer allocation method is
specific to Brocade at this point so only a Bro-cade
switch to Brocade switch could effectively
take advantage of this capability. Changes in
storage devices, host bus adapters, or switches
from other vendors would be required to allow
those elements to connect at the extended dis-tances.
The ability to link SANs at 100 KM is
a significant advantage for customers building
SAN infrastructures that need to link geo-graphically
dispersed SANs or support remote
copy operations. This will provide a signifi-cant
advantage for Brocade in differentiating
themselves from the other switch vendors.
· Fabric OS API
The API allows Brocade partners to have ac-cess
to the same SAN resources that the Fabric
OS can monitor and control. This is important
for SAN Management vendors that will supply
a single interface for management of the stor-age
network without have to launch other ven-dor’s
programs. This level of SAN manage-ment
gives those vendors (including those de-veloping
SAN management appliances) the
ability to provide total control through a consis-tent
single interface.
This announcement probably was overlooked
by many people but contains some very impor-tant
capabilities that will be extremely valu-able
to users. System vendors and integrators
that exploit these capabilities should an-nounce
their usage or intended usage of these
new capabilities from Brocade.
As the basic switching functions move toward
commodity, Brocade continues to differentiate
themselves with additional features and func-tions.
This certainly is an important an-nouncement
and distinguishes Brocade. Their
competition will have to react to this in some
way.
Seems like Q would want to increase their buffers too for longer connections? |
