Integrates Ethernet products into fabric architecture
Brocade’s Technology Summit held May 3 and May 4 in San Jose provided a rational view of their newest products and strategy for continued market share in the host Fibre Channel fabric and share growth in a new series of converged adapter and switch products that provide Ethernet and Fibre Channel capability in the same device.
Brocade’s Klayko sees long path to cloud
Brocade summarized a Forrester Research survey of virtualized server users that show storage protocol use at 76% Fibre Channel followed by 36% NFS (NAS), 23% iSCSI, 4% Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and 4% Direct Attached Storage. To reinforce additional virtualized workloads, Gartner predicts a 10X growth in virtual desktop infrastructure from today’s 5 million clients to 50 million by 2013, equaling up to 15% of all enterprise end-point deployments. Jason Nolet, VP, Data Center and Enterprise Networking Group at Brocade, also emphasized the well-discussed I/O bottleneck between multi-core CPUs and rotating media. SSDs provide a cure but require loads of bandwidth.
Again, Gartner’s prediction is a 75% Compound Annual Growth Rate in enterprise SSDs of 71% from 2010 and 2014. Transition to next-generation, cloud-compliant data centers will require additional storage bandwidth provided by 16Gb and 32Gb Fibre Channel protocols and the ability to rapidly leverage breakthroughs in storage performance. As you have read here, we expect Fibre Channel drives to just about disappear over the next five years, while Fibre Channel as a host-to-storage protocol will continue to thrive due to its high rates and management visibility. Nolet went on to announce a series of new Fibre Channel products based on Brocade’s seventh generation of ASICs. Among them were:
The Brocade DCX 8510 SAN Backbone — The 8510 supports 384 16Gb/sec. or 512 8 Gb/sec. ports with 8.2Tb/sec. total bandwidth. With advanced automation, diagnostics and monitoring, the 8510 only uses .2 watts per Gb/sec. The metro and geo SAN connectivity provides 10 or 16 Gb/sec. Fibre Channel over distances up to 100 kilometers, and 1 or 10 Gb/sec. Ethernet over wide area links beyond 100 km. Inter-chassis links (ICLs) reduce complexity, reducing cable cost, allowing frame-based trunking between ICLs freeing more ports for server and storage connections.
The Brocade 6510 Switch — The 6510 switch offers ‘pay-as-you-grow’ scalability with 24 or 48 ports on demand. Each Fibre Channel port is configurable to 2G-, 4G-, 8G- or 16Gbps with an aggregate bandwidth of 768Gbps in a 1U form factor. Port cost is comparable to 10Gbps Ethernet with higher performance.
The Brocade 1860 Fabric Adapter — The 1860 provides host bus adapter, converged network adapter and network interface card functionality all in a single product. Available in single and dual-port models, the 1860 provides 16Gbps Fibre Channel as well as 10Gbps connectivity at a cost less than current 10Gbps Ethernet NICs. Each physical link can be logically partitioned into as many as eight vNICs/vHBAs.
Nolet went on to make clear that all existing Brocade DCX products can be firmware upgraded to support 16Gbps Fibre Channel with advanced network monitoring and diagnostic capabilities.
