Brocade Advanced Enterprise Bundle

Some of the increase in fabric complexity comes from the natural growth of storage, as more business is conducted using digital information. But the use of server and storage virtualization to enable cost-effective sharing of pooled physical resources (computing, storage) also increases complexity. It is becoming more difficult to understand the dynamic behavior of the fabric as traffic patterns shift more quickly. This transformation defines important requirements for adaptive networking.

Based on Brocade Frame Filtering technology and a unique performance counter engine, Brocade Advanced Performance Monitoring is a comprehensive tool for monitoring the performance of networked storage resources. This tool helps reduce total cost of ownership and over-provisioning while enabling SAN performance tuning, reporting of service level agreements, and greater administrator productivity.

Brocade Fabric Watch is a Storage Area Network (SAN) health monitor for Brocade switches. Fabric Watch enables each switch to constantly watch its SAN fabric for potential faults - and automatically alert network managers to problems before they become costly failures. Fabric Watch tracks a variety of SAN fabric elements, events, and counters. Monitoring fabric-wide events, ports, transceivers, and environmental parameters permits early fault detection and isolation as well as performance measurement. Unlike many systems monitors, Fabric Watch is easy to configure. Network administrators can select custom fabric elements and alert thresholds - or they can choose from a selection of preconfigured settings. In addition, it is easy to integrate Fabric Watch with enterprise systems management solutions.

This technology is ideal for optimizing performance and simplifying the management of multi-switch SAN fabrics containing Brocade 1, 2, and 4 Gbps switches and directors and the latest 8 Gbps solutions. When two or more adjacent ISLs in a port group are used to connect two switches with trunking enabled, the switches automatically group the ISLs into a single logical ISL, or "trunk". The throughput of the resulting trunk can be anywhere from 4 Gbps to as much as 68 Gbps.

Fiber Channel-based networking technology has revitalized the reliability and performance of server and storage environments - providing a robust infrastructure to meet the most demanding business requirements. In addition to improving reliability and performance, Fiber Channel provides the capability to distribute server and storage connections over distances up to 30 kilometers using enhanced long-wave optics and dark fiber - enabling SAN deployment in campus environments. Extended Fabrics software is ideal for deploying a single extended fabric over dark fiber or DWDM-based Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs). These extended distance connections use standard switch ports that provide E Port interconnectivity over extended long-wave transceivers, Fiber Channel repeaters, or DWDM connections. This design provides high bandwidth at long distances, improving scalability with simplified management.

Key Points

Product Features