Marketing description

The Brocade 16 Gb Fiber Channel (FC) host bus adapters (HBAs) for IBM System x are part of a family of high-performance FC HBA solutions. These HBAs deliver exceptional performance, enabling small and medium businesses to experience unsurpassed robustness and reliability for a wide spectrum of servers, storage, and SANs.
Brocade 16Gb FC HBAs enhance availability via a unified driver with integrated firmware and simplified broadcast of driver updates across the fabric, including a proactive driver/firmware check of version levels to ensure synchronization. Fabric boot LUN discovery allows a server to boot-from-SAN, simplifying startup and reducing image management complexity. Fabric Assigned World Wide Name (FA-WWN) auto-assigns the switch port WWN upon install, simplifying server deployment and ongoing management.

Key selling points

• 16 Gbps Fiber Channel
• Over 500,000 IOPS per port
• Fabric Assigned World Wide Name (FA-WWN)
• Boot-from-SAN
• Brocade Server Application Optimization (SAO)
• Direct I/O
• Brocade Network Advisor
• Brocade Diagnostics (D-Port)
• LUN masking
• Target Rate Limiting (TRL)

Product features

• 16 Gbps Fiber Channel
  16 Gb FC enables I/O consolidation of multiple 2/4/8 Gbps Fiber Channel HBAs into a single adapter to dramatically reduce CapEx/OpEx costs. It can also provide 50% server rack space savings by reducing from a 2U to 1U rack-mount server with fewer PCIe adapter slots.
• Over 500,000 IOPS per port
  The industry's most powerful FC adapter that achieves the highest transaction performance to maximize density of VMs per server, performance of 315,000 IOPS for email Exchange, and 205,000 IOPS for SQL Database.
• Fabric Assigned World Wide Name (FA-WWN)
  FA-WWN virtualizes host WWNs to simplify server deployment by enabling pre-provisioning prior to initial install and to eliminate time-consuming fabric reconfigurations when replacing adapters and servers.
• Boot-from-SAN
  Automate SAN Boot LUN discovery to simplify boot from SAN and reduce image management complexity and support for Direct Attached Storage (DAS point-to-point topology).
• Brocade Server Application Optimization (SAO)
  Quality of Service (QoS) levels assignable to VM applications and support for N Port Trunking of 2×16 Gbps links into a single logical 32 Gbps link to improve application performance and availability.
• Direct I/O
  This enables native (direct) I/O performance by allowing VMs to bypass the hypervisor and communicate directly with the adapter.
• Brocade Network Advisor
  This simplifies and unifies the management of Brocade adapter, SAN, and LAN resources through a single pane-of-glass.
• Brocade Diagnostics (D-Port)
  This improves detection and isolation of 16 Gbps optics problems between adapters and switches.
• LUN masking
  Initiator-based LUN masking for storage traffic isolation.
• Target Rate Limiting (TRL)
  This throttles data traffic when accessing slower speed storage targets to avoid back pressure problems.