Brocade has unveiled its new 7840 Extension Switch and announced enhancements to its Fabric Vision technology. With this, Brocade’s customers can now benefit from a six-fold increase in performance, along with higher availability and simplified management between distributed data centres.
In a study on disaster recovery in the Middle East, Turkey and Morocco, EMC, one of Brocade’s OEM partners that will be offering the new solutions, found that 82% of regional organizations are not very confident that they can fully recover after a disaster.
“Data is the lifeblood of the modern enterprise and safeguarding it even in the event of a calamity is what businesses must now accomplish. We have designed the 7840 Extension Switch to greatly improve the resilience and availability of our customer’s data and applications,” said Yarob Sakhnini, regional director, MEMA at Brocade Communications. According to Brocade, for DR purposes, the solution also offers a significantly better performance at a lower cost of ownership than WAN optimization appliances.
The extensions to Fabric Vision technology, Brocade’s fabric network monitoring solution, will give organizations greater control and visibility into their remotely operated data centres. “With the centralization of IT and cloud computing being key themes in a time of rapid expansion, the ability for IT teams to manage such distributed data centres will be key to driving business agility while controlling costs,” said Sakhnini. The extension of Fabric Vision will automate monitoring, increase insight, and simplify troubleshooting over distance to automatically detect WAN anomalies, thus ensuring performance and mitigating unplanned downtime.
The key features that have been added to Brocade’s Fabric Vision Technology include:
Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite (MAPS): Simplifies monitoring with policy-based automation between data centres to automatically detect WAN anomalies and avoid unplanned downtime.
Flow Vision: Accelerates troubleshooting of end-to-end I/O flows over distance with integrated diagnostics and eliminates the need for expensive third-party tools.
Dashboards: Helps discover and resolve WAN network issues via root-cause analysis and point-in-time playback. Administrators can view all critical information from thin-client, Web-accessible dashboards.
The new Extension Switch delivers 80 Gbps of application data throughput while securing data flows over distance with 256-bit IPsec encryption without a performance penalty. According to the company, the switch will also offer both the industry’s first 40 Gigabits per second (Gbps) as well as 10 Gbps FCIP connectivity options. Other noteworthy feature include WAN-side non-disruptive firmware upgrades; combining of multiple WAN connections into a single, logical, high-bandwidth trunk that helps protect against WAN link failures; and adaptive rate limiting to optimize bandwidth utilization and maintain WAN performance during disruptions.
The company also introduced the Brocade FC16-64, a new port blade for the Brocade DCX® 8510 Director which increases the director’s scalability up to 512 Gen 5 Fibre Channel ports with a total system bandwidth of 10.2 Terabits per second (Tbps). Each blade consumes 70 percent less power compared to competitive offerings, while simultaneously increasing port density by 33 percent and reducing cabling requirements by 75 percent.
