achieving enterprise san performance with the brocade dcx backbone

7/25/2019 Achieving Enterprise SAN Performance With the Brocade DCX Backbone

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www.brocade.com

DATA CENTER Achieving Enterprise

SAN Performance with the

Brocade DCX Backbone

WHITE PAPER

A best-in-class architecture enables optimum

performance, exibility, and reliability for enterprise

data center networks.


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The BrocadeDCXBackbone is the industrys highest-performing

enterprise-class platform for Storage Area Networks (SANs). With its

intelligent sixth-generation ASICs and new hardware and software

capabilities, the Brocade DCX provides a reliable foundation for fully

connected, multiprotocol SAN fabrics, FICON solutions, and MetaSANs

capable of supporting thousands of servers and storage devices.

The Brocade DCX Backbone also provides industry-leading power and

cooling efciency, helping to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO),

as well as helping to reduce overall OpEx.

This paper details the architecture advantages of the Brocade DCX

Backbone and describes how IT organizations can leverage the

performance capabilities, modular exibility, and ve-nines

(99.999 percent) reliability of this SAN platform to achieve specic

business requirements.

OVERVIEW

In January 2008, Brocade introduced the Brocade DCX Backbone (see Figure 1), the

rst platform in the industry to provide 8 Gigabits per second (Gbps) Fibre Channel (FC)

capabilities. With the release of Fabric OS (FOS) 6.0 at the same time, the Brocade DCX

Backbone added 8 Gbps Fibre Channel and FICON performance for data-intensive storage

applications.

In January 2009, the Brocade DCX-4S (see Figure 2) was added to the backbone family,and the Brocade DCX has become a key component in thousands of data centers around the

world. New Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and SAN extension blades were introduced in

September 2009. In June 2010, Brocade launched the industrys rst and only 8 Gbps

64-port blade.

Although this paper focuses on the Brocade DCX, some information is provided for the

Brocade DCX-4X Backbone, notably in the section on Inter-Chassis Link (ICL) conguration.

For more details on these two backbone platforms, see the Brocade DCX Backbone Family

Data Sheet on www.brocade.com.


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Compared to competitive offerings, the Brocade DCX Backbone is the industrys fastest and

most advanced SAN backbone, providing numerous advantages:

Scales non-disruptively from 16 to as many as 512 concurrently active 4 or 8 Gbps full-

duplex ports in a single domain (open systems)

Scales non-disruptively from 16 to as many as 256 concurrently active 4 or 8 Gbps full-

duplex ports in a single domain (FICON)

Enables simultaneous uncongested switching on all ports as long as simple best practices

are followed

Can provide 4.6 Terabits per second (Tbps) (Brocade DCX) or 2.3 Tbps (Brocade DCX-4S)

utilizing 8 Gbps blades, Inter-Chassis Links (ICLs), and Local Switching.

In addition to providing the highest levels of performance, the Brocade DCX Backbone

features a modular, high-availability architecture that supports mission-critical environments.

Moreover, the platforms industry-leading power and cooling efciency helps reduce

ownership costs while maximizing rack density.

The Brocade DCX Backbone uses just 6 watts AC per port and 0.7 watts per Gbps at its

maximum 8 Gbps 512-port conguration. The Brocade DCX-4S uses just 6.7 watts AC per

port and 0.8 watts per Gbps at its maximum 8 Gbps 256-port conguration. Both are twice

as efcient as its their predecessors and up to six times more efcient than competitive

products. This efciency not only reduces data center power billsit reduces cooling

requirements and minimizes or eliminates the need for data center infrastructure upgrades,

such as new Power Distribution Units (PDUs), power circuits, and larger Heating, Ventilation,

and Air Conditioning (HVAC) units. In addition, the highly integrated architecture uses fewer

active electric components boarding the chassis, which improves key reliability metrics such

as Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF).

The Brocade DCX Backbone leverages a highly exible multiprotocol architecture, supporting

Fibre Channel, Fibre Connectivity (FICON), Fibre Channel over Ethernet, Fibre Channel over

IP (FCIP), IP over Fibre Channel (IPFC), and Data Center Bridging (DCB) IT organizations

can also easily mix FC port blades with advanced functionality blades for FCoE server I/O

convergence, SAN encryption, and SAN extension to build an infrastructure that optimizes

functionality, price, and performance. And ease of setup enables data center administrators

to quickly maximize its performance and availability.

This paper describes the internal architecture of Brocade DCX Backbones and how best

to leverage their industry-leading performance and blade exibility to meet business

requirements.

How Is Fibre Channel

Bandwidth Measured?

Fibre Channel is a lossless, low- latency,

full-duplex network protocol, meaning thatdata can be transmitted and received

simultaneously. The name of a specic Fibre

Channel standard, for example 8 Gbps FC,

refers to how fast an application payload

can move in one direction. This is called

data rate. Vendors sometimes state data

rates followed by the words full duplex, for

example 8 Gbps full duplex, although it is

not necessary when referring to Fibre

Channel speeds. The term aggregate data

rate is the sum of the application payloads

moving in each direction (full duplex) and is

equal to twice the data rate.

Figure 1.

Brocade DCX (left)

and Brocade DCX-4S (right).


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BROCADE DCX ASIC FEATURES

The Brocade DCX Backbone Control Routers (CR8s) feature Brocade Condor 2 ASICs, each

capable of switching at 640 Gbps. Each Brocade Condor 2 ASIC has 40 x 8 Gbps ports, which

can be combined into trunk groups of multiple sizes. The Brocade DCX architecture leverages

the same Fibre Channel protocols as the front-end ports, enabling back-end ports to avoid

latency due to protocol conversion overhead.

When a frame enters the ASIC, the destination address is read from the header, which

enables routing decisions to be made before the entire frame has been received. This is

known within the industry as Cut-Through Routing, which means that a frame can begin

transmission out of the correct destination port on the ASIC even before the frame has

nished entering the ingress port. Local latency on the same ASIC is 0.7 s and blade-to-

blade latency is 2.1 s. As a result, the Brocade DCX has the lowest switching latency and

highest throughput of any Fibre Channel backbone platform in the industry.

Each Condor 2 (8 Gbps) ASICs on a port blade can act as an independent switching engine

to provide Local Switching between port groups in addition to switching across the backplane

Local Switching trafc does not cross the backplane, nor consume any slot bandwidth.

This enables every port on high-density blades to communicate at full 8 Gbps. That is just

700 nsat least 25 times faster than the next-fastest SAN enterprise platform on the market

On the 16-, 32-, and 64-port blades, Local Switching is performed within 16-port groups. On

48-port blades, Local Switching is performed within 24-port groups. Only Brocade offers an

enterprise architecture that can make these types

of switching decisions at the port level, enabling

Local Switching and the ability to deliver up to 4.6

Tbps (Brocade DCX) and 2.0 Tbps (Brocade DCX-

4S) of aggregate bandwidth per backbone.

To support long-distance congurations, 8 Gbps

blades have Condor 2 ASICs that provide 2,048

buffer-to-buffer credits per 16-port group on

16-, 32-, and 64-port blades, and per 24-port

group on 48-port blades.

Condor 2 ASICs also enable Brocade Inter-Switch Link (ISL) Trunking with up to 64 Gbps

full-duplex, frame-level trunks (up to 8 x 8 Gbps links in a trunk) and Dynamic Path Selection

(DPS) for exchange-level routing between individual ISLs or ISL Trunking groups. Exchange-

based DPS automatically optimizes fabric-wide performance by automatically routing data

to the most efcient available path in the fabric. DPS augments ISL Trunking to provide more

effective load balancing in certain congurations, such as routing data between multiple

trunk groups. Up to 8 trunks can be balanced to achieve a total throughput of 512 Gbps.

Furthermore, Brocade has signicantly improved frame-level Trunking through a masterless

link in a trunk group. If an ISL trunk link ever fails, the ISL trunk seamlessly reforms with the

remaining links, enabling higher overall data availability.

Preventing frame loss during an event such as the addition or removal of an ISL while thefabric is active is a critical customer requirement. Lossless Dynamic Load Sharing and DPS

enable optimal utilization of ISLs by performing trafc rebalancing operations during fabric

events such as E_Port up/down, F_Port down, and so on. Typically, when a port goes down or

comes back up, frames may be dropped or arrive out of order or trafc imbalance may occur.

Brocades Lossless DLS/DPS architecture rebalances trafc at the frame and exchange level

delivering in-order trafc without dropping frames, thus preventing application timeouts or

SCSI retries.

Unlike competitive

offerings, frames that

are switched within

port groups are always

capable of full port

speed.


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BROCADE DCX PLATFORM ARCHITECTURE

In the Brocade DCX, each port blade has Condor 2 ASICs that expose some ports for

user connectivity and some ports to the control processors core switching ASICs via the

backplane. The backbone uses a multi-stage ASIC layout analogous to a fat-tree core/

edge topology. The fat-tree layout is symmetrical, that is, all ports have equal access to all

other ports. The platform can switch frames locally if the destination port is on the sameASIC as the source. This is an important feature for high-density environments, because it

allows blades that are oversubscribed when switching between blade ASICs to achieve full,

uncongested performance when switching on the same ASIC. No other backbone offers

Local Switchingwith competing offerings, trafc must traverse the crossbar ASIC and

backplane even when traveling to a neighboring porta function that signicantly degrades

performance.

The exible Brocade DCX architecture uses a wide variety of blades for increasing port

density, multiprotocol capabilities, and fabric-based applications. Data center administrators

can easily mix the blades in the Brocade DCX to address specic business requirements

and optimize cost/performance ratios. The following blades are currently available (as of

mid-2010).

Blade Name Description Introduced with

CP8 - Control Processor Provides service activities and

manageability of the backbone

FOS 6.0

CR8 - Core Switching 1,024 Gbps per CR8

ICL ports on every CR8 blade

turned on via an optional license

FOS 6.0

FC8-16 16 ports, 8 Gbps FC blade FOS 6.0




FCOE10-24 24 ports, 10 Gbps FCoE/DCB blade FOS 6.3

FS8-18 Encryption

Blade

16 ports, 8 Gbps, line-speed

encryption of data-at-rest

FOS 6.1.1_enc

FX8-24 Extension

Blade

24 ports, 12 x 8 Gbps FC ports,

10 x 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports, and

two optional 10 GbE ports for long-distance

extension of FCIP blade

FOS 6.3


FA4-18 Fabric

Application Blade

18 ports, 4 Gbps FC application blade FOS 5.3


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CORE BLADES AND INTER-CHASSIS LINK (ICL) PORTS

Control Processors

The Brocade DCX has two Control Processor (CP8) blades. The control processor functions

are redundant active-passive (hot-standby). The blade with the active control processor

is known as the active control processor blade, but either could be active or standby.

Additionally on the each processor are a USB port and two network ports. The USB is only

for use with a Brocade-branded USB storage device. The dual IP ports allow a customer to

potentially fail over internally on the same CP without the loss of an IP connection rather than

fail over to the standby CP blade.

Control Routing Blades

The Brocade DCX includes two Control Routing (CR8) blades. This blade provides core routingof the frames either from blade to blade or from DCX to DCX/DCX-4S through the ICL ports.

The CR8 blades are Active-Active in each Brocade DCX chassis. Each CR8 blade has four

Condor 2 ASICs, and each ASIC has dual connection to each ASIC group on each line card.

There are 2 x ICL connections on each CR8 blade. These can be connected to another DCX

or DCX-4S chassis as shown in Figures 3, 4, and 5.

Figure 1.

CP8 blade design.

Optical Power Slider

Allows graceful CP

failover with no

dropped frames

Control Path to Blades

CP Power

Control Processor Block

USB Management Port

Serial Management Port

Ethernet Management Ports

CP Power

Control Path to BladesCPU

Optical Power Slider

Allows graceful CR

failover with no

dropped frames

CR Power

1 Tbps to Blades

over Backplane

CR Power

ASIC

ASIC

ASIC

ASIC

128 Gbps

ICL Connection

(ICL1)

128 Gbps

ICL Connection

(ICL0)

Switching Block

Figure 2.

CR8 blade design.


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Multi-Chassis Confguration

The dual-and triple-chassis congurations for the Brocade DCX and DCX-4S provide ultra-high-

speed Inter-Chassis Link (ICL) ports to connect two or three backbones, providing extensive

scalability (up to 1536 x 8 Gbps universal FC ports) and exibility at the network core. Special

ICL copper-based cables are used, which connect directly and require no SFPs. Connections

are made between 8 ICL ports (4 per chassis), located on the CR8 blades. The supportedcable congurations for connecting two Brocade DCX Backbones are shown in Figure 3. The

supported congurations for a three-chassis conguration are shown in Figure 4. This is a

good option for customers who want to build a powerful core without wasting the ports for ISL

connectivity between chassis.

NOTE: In a single rack, you can connect three Brocade DCX-4S chassis in addition to the

options shown in Figure 4. A three-chassis topology is supported for chassis in two racks as

long as the third chassis is in the middle of the second rack.

Brocade DCX supports 16 or 8 links per ICL cable, which means 16 or 8 Gbps E_Ports per ICL

cable. The Brocade DCX-4S supports 8 links per ICL.

Brocade DCX

Brocade DCX-4S

ICL cables

Figure 3.

Examples of

Brocade DCX/DCX-4S

dual-chassis conguration.


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Brocade DCX

Brocade DCX-4S

Figure 4.

Examples of

Brocade DCX/DCX-4S

three-chassis conguration.

Figure 5.

Photograph of a Brocade DCX

three-chassis conguration

across two racks.


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8 GBPS FIBRE CHANNEL BLADES

Brocade offers 16-, 32-, 48-, and 64-port 8 Gbps blades to connect to servers, storage,

or switches. All of the port blades can leverage Local Switching to ensure full 8 Gbps

performance on all ports. Each CR8 blade contains four ASICs that switch data over the

backplane between port blade ASICs. A total 256 Gbps of aggregate bandwidth per blade is

available for switching through the backplane. Mixing switching over the backplane with LocalSwitching delivers performance of up to 512 Gbps per blade using 64-port blades.

For distance over dark ber using Brocade-branded Small Form Factor Pluggables (SFPs),

the Condor 2 ASIC has approximately twice the buffer credits as the Condor ASICenabling

1, 2, 4, or 8 Gbps ISLs and more long-wave connections over greater distances.

When connecting a large number of devices that need sustained 8 Gbps transmission line

rates, IT organizations can leverage Local Switching to avoid congestion. Local Switching on

FC port blades reduces port-to-port latencyframes cross the backplane in 2.1 s, locally

switched frames cross the blade in only 700 nsthe latency from crossing the backplane is

still more than 50 times faster than disk access times and is much faster than any competing

product.

All 8 Gbps ports on the FC8-16 blade operate at full line rate through the backplane or with

Local Switching.

Figure 6 shows a photo and functional diagram of the 8 Gbps 16-port blade.

Switching Speed Defned

When describing SAN switching speed,vendors typically use the following

measurements:

Milliseconds (ms):

One thousandth of a second

Microseconds (s):

One millionth of a second

Nanoseconds (ns):

One billionth of a second

Figure 6.

FC8-16 blade design.

ASIC256 Gbps to

Core Switching

No Oversubscription

at 8 Gbps

16 8 Gbps ports

Power and

Control Path


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The FC8-64 blade has a 2:1 oversubscription ratio at 8 Gbps switching through the

backplane and no oversubscription with Local Switching. At 4 Gbps speeds, all 64 ports

can switch over the backplane with no oversubscription. The FC8-64 blade exposes 16

user-facing ports per ASIC, and up to eight 8-port trunk groups can be created with the

64-port blade.

Figure 9 shows a photograph and functional diagram of the FC8-64 blade.

SPECIALTY BLADES

DCB/FCoE Blade

The Brocade FCOE10-24 blade is designed as an end-of-row chassis solution for server I/O

consolidation (see Figure 15). Its a resilient, hot-pluggable blade that features 24 x 10 Gbps

Data Center Bridging (DCB) ports with a Layer 2 cut-through and non-blocking architecture,

which provides wire-speed performance for traditional Ethernet, DCB, and FCoE trafc.

The FCOE10-24 features a high-performance FCoE hardware engine (Encap/Decap) and can

use 8 Gbps Fibre Channel ports on 16-, 32-, and 48-port blades to integrate seamlessly into

existing Fibre Channel SANs and management infrastructures. The blade supports industry-

standard Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) and Brocade enhanced, frame-based port

Trunking that delivers 40 Gbps of aggregate bandwidth.

ASIC

ASIC

Relative 2:1

Oversubscription

at 8 Gbps

16 8 Gbps

Port Groups

Power and

Control Path

256 Gbps toBackplane

512 Gbps Available

for Local Switching

Fibre Channel

Switching

ASIC

ASIC

Figure 9.

FC8-64 blade design.


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Figure 10 shows a photograph and functional diagram of the FCOE10-24.

SAN Encryption Blade

The Brocade FS8-18 Encryption Blade provides of 16 x 8 Gbps Fibre Channel ports and

2 x RJ-45 GbE ports, and a Smart Card reader. The Brocade FS8-18 is a high-speed, highly

reliable FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated blade, which provides fabric-based encryption and

compression services to secure data assets either selectively or on a comprehensive basis.

The blade scales non-disruptively from 48 up to 96 Gbps of disk encryption processing power

It also provides encryption and compression services at speeds up to 48 Gbps for data on

tape storage media. Moreover, the Brocade FS8-18 is tightly integrated with four industry-

leading, enterprise-class key management systems that can scale to support key lifecycle

services across distributed environments.

Figure 11 shows a photograph and functional diagram of the FS8-18.

Figure 10.

Brocade FCOE10-24

Blade design.

ASIC

ASICs

Power and

Control Path

256 Gbps to

Backplane

24 x 10 GbE

Ports

Fibre Channel

Switching

ASICs

FCoE

Bridging

DCB

Switching

8 x 8 Gbps

Fibre Channel ports

8 x 8 Gbps

Fibre Channel ports

Power and

Control PathSmart Card reader

2 x RJ-45 GbE

reduncant

cluster ports

FIPS 140-2 Level 3

Cryptographic Cover

Figure 11.

Brocade FS8-18

Encryption Blade design.


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SAN Extension Blade

Brocade FX8-24 Extension Blades accelerate and optimize replication, backup, and

migration over any distance with the fastest, most reliable, and most cost-effective network

infrastructure. Twelve 8 Gbps Fibre Channel ports, ten 1 GbE ports, and up to two optional

10 GbE ports provide unmatched Fibre Channel and FCIP bandwidth, port density, and

throughput for maximum application performance over IP WAN links. Whether deployed inlarge data centers or multisite environments, the Brocade FX8-24 enables replication and

backup applications to move more data faster and fur ther than ever before to address the

most demanding disaster recovery, compliance, and data mobility requirements.

Figure 12 shows a photograph and functional diagram of the FX8-24.

6-port 10 Gbps Fibre Channel Blade

The Brocade FC10-6 blade consists of 6 x 10 Gbps Fibre Channel ports that use 10 Gigabit

Small Form Factor Pluggable (XFP) optical transceivers. The primary use for the FC10-6 blade

is for long-distance extension over dark ber. The ports on the FC10-6 blade operate only in

E_Port mode to create ISLs. The FC10-6 blade has buffering to drive 10 Gbps connectivity up

to 120 km per port and exceed the capabilities of 10 Gbps XFPs available in short-wave,

10, 40, and 80 km long-wave versions. While potential oversubscription of a fully populated

blade is small (1.125:1), Local Switching is supported in groups consisting of ports 0 to 2

and ports 3 to 5, enabling maximum port speeds ranging from 8.9 to 10 Gbps full duplex.

Storage Application BladeThe Brocade FA4-18 Application Blade has 16 x 4 Gbps Fibre Channel ports and 2 x

auto-sensing 10/100/1000 Megabits per second (Mbps) Ethernet ports for LAN-based

management. It is tightly integrated with several enterprise storage applications that leverage

the Brocade Storage Application Services (SAS) APIan implementation of the T11 FAIS

standardto provide wire-speed data movement and ofoad server resources. These fabric-

based applications provide online data migration, storage virtualization, and continuous data

replication and protection, and other partner applications.

ASIC

Power and

Control Path

64 Gbps to

Backplane

10 x GbE

Ports

Fibre Channel

Switching

FCIP,

Compression,

and Encryption

12 x 8 Gbps

Port Switching

Group

2 x Optional

10 GbE Ports

Figure 12.

FX8-24 blade design.


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THE BENEFITS OF CORE/EDGE NETWORK DESIGN

The core/edge network topology has emerged as the design of choice for large-scale, highly

available, high-performance SANs constructed with multiple switches of any size.

The Brocade DCX Backbone uses an internal architecture analogous to a core/edge fat-

tree topology, which is widely recognized as being the highest-performance arrangement of

switches. Note that the Brocade DCX Backbone is not literally a fat-tree network of discrete

switches, but thinking of it in this way provides a useful visualization.

While IT organizations could build a network of 40-port switches with similar performance

characteristics to the Brocade DCX Backbone, it would require more than a dozen 40-port

switches connected in a fat-tree fashion. This network would require complex cabling,

management of 12+ discrete switching elements, support for higher power and cooling,

and more SFPs to support ISLs. In contrast,

the Brocade DCX delivers the same high

level of performance without the associated

disadvantages of a large multi-switch network,

bringing fat-tree performance to IT organizations

that could previously not justify the investment or

overhead costs.

It is important to understand, however, that the

internal ASIC connections in a Brocade DCX

Backbone are not E_Ports connecting a network

of switches. They are considered C_Ports. Since

they are not E_Ports, typical E_Port overhead is

not present on the C_Port. The Fabric OS and ASIC architecture enables the entire backbone

to be a single domain and a single hop in a Fibre Channel network. Unlike a situation in which

a switch is removed from a fabric, a fabric reconguration is not sent across the network

when a port blade is removed, further simplifying operations.

In comparison to a multi-switch, fat-tree network, the Brocade DCX Backbone:

Is easier to deploy and manageSimplies the cable plant by eliminating ISLs and additional SFP media

Is far more scalable than a large network of independent domains

Is lower in both initial CapEx and ongoing OpEx

Has fewer active components and more component redundancy for higher reliability

Provides multiprotocol support and routing within a single chassis

The Brocade DCX

Backbone architecture

enables the entire

backbone to be a singledomain and a single

hop in a Fibre Channel

network.


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PERFORMANCE IMPACT OF CONTROL ROUTING FAILURE MODES

Any type of failure on the Brocade DCXwhether a control processor or core ASICis

extremely rare. However, in the unusual event of a failure, the Brocade DCX is designed for

fast and easy control processor replacement. This section describes potential (albeit unlikely)

failure scenarios and how the Brocade DCX is designed to minimize the impact

on performance and provide the highest level of system availability.

Control Processor Failure in a CP8 Blade

If the processor section of the active control processor blade fails, it affects only the

management plane and data trafc between end devices continues to ow uninterrupted.

With the addition of the second IP port, the risk of having to fail over to a standby CP is

potentially minimized. A control processor failure has no effect on the data plane: the standby

control processor automatically takes over and the backbone continues to operate without

dropping any data frames.

Data ows would not necessarily become congested in the Brocade DCX Backbone with one

CP8 failure. A worst- case scenario would require the backbone to be running at or near

50 percent of bandwidth capacity on a sustained basis. With typical I/O patterns and some

Local Switching, however, aggregate bandwidth demand is often below 50 percent maximum

capacity. In such environments there would be no impact, even if a failure persisted for

an extended period of time. For environments with higher bandwidth usage, performance

degradation would last only until the failed core blade is replaced, a simple 5-minute

procedure.

Core Routing Failure in a CR8 Blade

The potential impact of a core element failure to overall system performance is

straightforward. If half of the core elements were to go ofine due to a hardware failure, half

of the aggregate switching capacity over the backplane would be ofine until the condition

was corrected. A Brocade DCX Backbone with just one CR8 can still provide 1,024 Gbps

aggregate bandwidth, or 128 Gbps to every backbone slot.

SUMMARY

With an aggregate chassis bandwidth far greater than competitive offerings, Brocade DCX

Backbones are architected to deliver congestion-free performance, broad scalability, and

high reliability for real-world enterprise SANs. As demonstrated by Brocade testing, the

Brocade DCX:

Delivers 8 and 4 Gbps Fibre Channel and FICON line-rate connectivity on all ports

simultaneously

Provides Local Switching to maximize bandwidth for high-demand applications

Offers port blade exibility to meet specic connectivity, performance, and budget needs

Provides investment protection by supporting data security, inter-fabric routing, SAN

extension, and emerging protocols such as FCoE in the same chassis

Performs fabric-based data migration, protection, and storage virtualizationDelivers ve-nines availability

For further details on the capabilities of the Brocade DCX Backbone in the Brocade data

center fabric, visit:

http://www.brocade.com/products-solutions/products/dcx-backbone/index.page

There you will nd the Brocade DCX Backbone Family Data Sheet and relevant Technical

Briefs and White Papers.


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2010 Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 06/10 GA-WP-1224-01

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trademarks of Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., in the United States and/or in other countries. Other brands,

products, or service names mentioned are or may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.

Notice: This document is for informational purposes only and does not set forth any warranty, expressed or implied,

concerning any equipment, equipment feature, or service offered or to be offered by Brocade. Brocade reserves the

right to make changes to this document at any time, without notice, and assumes no responsibility for its use. This

informational document describes features that may not be currently available. Contact a Brocade sales ofce for

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