Brocade Seeds 4-Gbit Fibre Channel Market

Brocade Communications Systems Inc. Monday unveiled new hardware and software in its SilkWorm line of Fibre Channel switches for storage area networks (SANs).

The vendor introduced the SilkWorm 4100, a 4 gigabit-per-second for midrange storage applications in branch offices or departments of larger enterprises. The new switch comes in 16-, 24- and 32-port configurations and Brocade said the ports are all auto-sensing for data link speeds of 1, 2 or 4 Gbits per second.

Using a new Brocade-designed ASIC, the SilkWorm 4100 supports an aggregate bandwidth of 256 Gbits per second in the 32-port configuration. The new ASIC also supports trunking for up to eight ports per trunk group and full-duplex trunk data rates as high as 32 Gbits per second between switches. Brocade also said that the 4-gigabit technology helps reduce the cost of SAN infrastructure by supporting twice the number of servers on each port as more widely deployed 2-gigabit switches.

"They're really working to make things simpler, which is a really big issue-customers need simplification," said Randy Kerns, senior partner with the Evaluator Group, Greenwood Village, Colo. "The big deal about 4-Gbit [Fibre Channel] is that if drive manufacturers switch over, it will drive down the cost of components. So the transition to 4-Gbit is not so much a performance issue as it is a matter of getting new, least-cost solutions.

Looking at the broader market, new 4-Gbit Fibre Channel equipment is expected to begin permeating storage networks by mid-2005; prices in general are expected to be under $500 port."The SilkWorm 4100 will come to market at prices comparable to 2-Gbit Fibre Channel, so why not purchase twice the speed at the same price?" asked Jay Kidd, Brocade's CTO. He added that new host bus adapters are expected early next year, and LTO-3 tape drives should come to market by June 2005.

Brocade also released a new version of its Fabric Operating System for the entire line of SilkWorm SAN switches and directors. Fabric OS 4.4 boasts faster data transfer rates over longer distances, higher port density for greater scalability within existing fabrics, improved network management, better security and FICON Control Unit Port (CUP) support for mainframe environments.

Fabric OS 4.4 now supports individual links as long as 500 kilometers and inter-switch trunking of up to 50 kilometers for 4-Gbit trunks and 25 kilometers for 8-Gbit trunks; that gives customers greater bandwidth efficiency, reduced backup times, and faster recovery, according to the vendor.

In addition, the Fabric OS enables increased port density so that fabric architectures can be scaled to as many as 50 domains, and when combined with the Brocade SilkWorm Multiprotocol Router, it can support routed fabrics or "meta-SANs" of more than 10,000 ports.

The new OS also supports FDMI host naming, which provides a detailed view of switches and servers for capacity planning and real-time analysis purposes. The OS also does load balancing via a Dynamic Path Selection feature. Color-coded pictures identify the general health of individual switches and their performance.In addition to support for the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), Fabric OS 4.4 has improved its security with support for RADIUS, Secure Sockets Layer, Secure HTTP and DH-CHAP.