Brocade Cocoons Itself In SilkWorm.Brocade Communications Systems Brocade, Inc. NASDAQ: BRCD, based in Silicon Valley, designs, manufactures, and sells storage networking solutions and management applications for storage area networks (SANs) and file area networks (FANs). , Inc. announced the next generation of its open, scalable Fibre Channel fabric A Fibre Channel fabric (or Fibre Channel switched fabric, FC-SW) is a switched fabric of Fibre Channel devices enabled by a Fibre Channel switch. Fabrics are normally subdivided by Fibre Channel zoning. Each fabric has a name server and provides other services. solutions for storage area networking, delivering on the next phase of its Fabric 2000 strategy. Based on Brocade brocade (brōkād`), fabric, originally silk, generally reputed to have been developed to a high state of perfection in the 16th and 17th cent. in France, Italy, and Spain. Communications' architecture, the SilkWorm silkworm, name for the larva of various species of moths, indigenous to Asia and Africa but now domesticated and raised for silk production throughout most of the temperate zone. The culture of silkworms is called sericulture. 2000 family is a new class of Fibre Channel switches Major manufacturers of Fibre Channel switches are: Brocade, Cisco, McData and Qlogic.
backward compatible - backward compatibility with Brocade's current installed base of switches. The products are expected to be generally available in Q3 1999. The company's loop switch is an offering that provides a migration path from loop-based storage environments to fabric-based SANs. Brocade's SilkWorm switches are the standard for connecting servers with storage devices through a Fibre Channel network, allowing companies to access and share storage in a scaleable SAN. SilkWorm 2100 is a Fibre Channel Loop switch that, through a software upgrade, provides a migration path from a loop-based storage environment to a fabric-based SAN. Highlights for the SilkWorm 2100 include an eight-port Fibre Channel Loop switch that provides interconnection for a FC-AL (Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop) See Fibre Channel. FC-AL - Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop. . A scalable alternative to a hub, SilkWorm 2100 offers a switching environment and a migration path from loop-based environments to full-fabric SANs. Each port supports parallel transfer rates of 100MB/sec. Unlike hub-based environments, which share bandwidth among ports, SilkWorm 2100 enables bandwidth data transfers simultaneously on all ports. It is software upgradeable to full-fabric support, which future-p roofs the investment in the switch as the SAN grows, and provides port-level fault isolation for reliability in loop environments. The SilkWorm 2400 and 2800 models are, respectively, eight-port and sixteen-port, Fibre Channel fabric switches that provide universal ports for installation and hardware port zoning for optimal security. These products are full-fabric Fibre Channel switches that create an infrastructure to support connectivity of a range of host and storage types. Both switches offer port support, hardware port zoning, self-discovery of SAN-attached devices, and "hot-swappable" components, including redundant power supplies and cooling. These features ensure the serviceability (system) serviceability - The ease with which corrective maintenance or preventative maintenance can be performed on a system (e.g. by a hardware service technician). Higher serviceability improves availability and reduces service cost. Serviceability is one component of RAS. in a full-fabric environment. The SilkWorm 2400 and SilkWorm 2800 are the first switches to support both fabric and loop environments independently on the same switch. Up to 32 switches can be interconnected to build backbone fabrics containing more than 400 ports. The SilkWorm family of Fibre Channel fabric switches and management software is the only suite of full-fabric, standards-based connectivity solutions available today for SANs. |
|
||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion