Brocade introduced its DCX Backbone platform featuring up to 896 ports of 8 Gbps Fibre Channel and aimed at next generation data center networks. Brocade said the new DCX provides more than five times the switching bandwidth of existing SAN directors and supports eight times as many virtual servers. Deployment options including the capability to support Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Data Center Ethernet (DCE), Gigabit Ethernet, and iSCSI protocols.
The Brocade Adaptive Networking services features included in the Brocade DCX enable the fabric to dynamically allocate shared resources as changes occur in the requirements of virtual servers and networked storage. If congestion occurs (or is predicted), the fabric can automatically adjust bandwidth and other resources according to defined service levels — helping to ensure that higher-priority workloads dynamically receive the resources they need.
The Brocade DCX is fully interoperable with Brocade and existing McDATA SANs, complementing the Brocade family of data center infrastructure products — including the Brocade M6140, Brocade Mi10K, and Brocade 48000 directors; Brocade 200E, Brocade 4900, and Brocade 5000 switches; and Brocade SAN extension solutions.
Brocade said its DCX is also designed for advanced fabric applications for data migration, continuous replication, and data encryption.
“Through massive consolidation of SANs, virtual server networks and Data Center Ethernet networks, the Brocade DCX Backbone will enable customers to drive significant costs out of their data center operations while ensuring the performance, scalability, and five-nines availability required for current and future applications,” said Ian Whiting, Vice President and General Manager for the Brocade Data Center Infrastructure Division.
Brocade also highlighted four key Adaptive Networking services for the increasingly virtualized data center. All are available on the Brocade DCX Backbone:
- Adaptive Fabric Quality of Service (QoS): This feature enables a detailed allocation of data center fabric resources to applications based on the relative importance of the application as defined by its QoS assignment. Brocade virtual channel technology allows each QoS priority to follow its assigned application as the application moves between physical and/or virtualized server and network connections, dynamically adjusting resources to avoid congestion.
- Adaptive Traffic Management services: This provides data flow and congestion management to support application service levels. Advanced queuing algorithms remove congestion potential and dedicate bandwidth to specific applications as needed.
- Dynamic Fabric Profiling services: This provides end-to-end analysis of individual application data flows and resource usage, supplying in-depth information about the impact on overall fabric performance. These services identify possible points of congestion, and monitor and report on numerous statistics for physical resource utilization.
- Adaptive Policy Management services: This capability detects under-utilized shared physical resources, reclaiming or reallocating them to optimize application flow according to defined policies-further ensuring that virtualized resources receive the appropriate amount of physical performance.
Adaptive Networking services from Brocade are available as part of the new Brocade Fabric OS(R) 6.0 software release, included with the new Brocade DCX Backbone.http://www.brocade.com
