Brocade Storage Switches

Featuring high reliability and scalability, Brocade storage switches are built for a variety of environments.  Brocade specializes in data and storage networking products including network-attached storage, storage area network (SAN), directors and switches, data center switches, virtual cluster switching, software-defined networking and network virtualization.  Brocade hardware products include Fiber Channel SAN directors and switches; Fiber Channel host bus adapters (HBAs); Ethernet transceivers and many other networking devices.  Founded in 1995 and headquartered in San Jose, California, Brocade held the largest market share in SAN switches in March 2012.

Ethernet switches and routers

Brocade acquired Foundry Networks in 2008 and entered into the Federal, ISP, carrier, enterprise and campus switch/router market.  Then in 2010, Brocade entered the 100 Gigabit Ethernet market with the 32-Port MLXe Core Router chassis.  Brocade also introduced a two-port 100 Gigabit Ethernet density of Internet core routers from its competitors Cisco and Juniper.  In November 2011, Brocade announced a large 100 Gigabit Ethernet deployment.  Brocade began shipping the Brocade VDX 6720 Switch as part of its product family for Ethernet fabric environments in December 2010.  This technology was designed for highly scalable virtualized and cloud computing environments.In 2011, Brocade introduced two additional products, VDX 6730 Switch and VDX 6710 Switch.

Models

VDX 6730 – This is a 10 GbE switch that can also use FCoE to bridge VCS Fabrics with Fiber channel SAN fabrics.

VDX 6710 – This is an entry-level 1/10 GbE switch that enables legacy 1 GbE servers to connect to VCS Fabrics as well as traditional LANs.

VDX 8770 – This switch supports single VCS Fabrics as large as 8000+ switch ports supporting up to 384,000 VMs attached to a single VCS Fabric.This provides port-to-port latency across 1, 10, and 40 GbE ports.

In November 2011, Brocade introduced the Brocade ICX product line. The switches are available in 24- and 48-port 1 GbE models, with optional 1/10 GbE uplink/stacking ports.

Models

ICX 6610- This is for Federal, enterprise and campus networking segment, with a maximum switching capacity of 576 Gbit/s and forwarding capacity of 432 Mpps with PoE+.

ICX 6430/6450 – These switches are for Federal, enterprise and campus networking segments, with full stacking capabilities as well as Layer 2 and Layer 3 functionality.

Fiber Channel

SilkWorm 1000 was Brocade’s first Fiber Channel switch that was released in 1997.  Eventually the SilkWorm switch opened up an opportunity for an entire line of products starting with the first product consequently being named SilkWorm 1000.  Because a switched Fiber Channel network is also referred to as a “fabric”, the product names were puns on various kinds of woven fabric.  Brocade released SilkWorm 6400 in 2001 and designated it as a “director”.  This term became universally used to refer to the more expensive fiber channel switches.

From 2001 to 2003, Brocade released switches based on its third generation ASIC, "BLOOM" (Big LOOM).  In April 2002, Brocade then integrated BLOOM into the SilkWorm 12000, its first “pure” director.  The SilkWorm 12000 director offered up to 128 ports in two 64-port pseudo-switches.  With several internal architecture and technical changes besides the new ASIC, the SilkWorm 12000 had an upgraded control processor system and also introduced the backplane architecture.  SilkWorm 12000 was named “Storage Product of the Year” by Computing in 2003.

When Brocade came out with BLOOM II, it improved on the previous ASIC design by reducing die size and power consumption while still maintaining 2 Gbit/s technology.  This paved the way for Brocade’s second generation director, the SilkWorm 24000.  Still a 128 port design, it was the first one which could operate as a single 128-port switch (a single domain).  The SilkWorm 24000 also uses about two thirds less power than the SilkWorm 12000.

Brocade also introduced the SilkWorm 7420, which was its first multiprotocol Fiber Channel router.  Around the same time Brocade was able to acquire Rhapsody Networks, a SAN virtualization startup company.  Brocade began to enter into the embedded switch market, delivering multiple switches that were integrated physically into other vendors’ hardware.

In 2010, Brocade introduced Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS) on the VDX ultra-low-latency data center switch product line.  These switches are DCB/CEE-and TRILL-based and eliminate Spanning Tree Protocol.  They also eliminate the support of multi-hop Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) as well as self-trunking.

“Gen 5 Fiber Channel” was the industry’s first 16 Gbit/s SAN platform family that Brocade introduced in May 2011.  This launch also included the Brocade DCX 8510 Backbone, 6510 switch and 1860 Fabric Adapter.

Models

DCX 8510 – Available in 8-slot or 4-slot chassis models.Can support up to 384 16Gbit/s ports at line-rate speeds.Chassis bandwidth supports up to 8.2 terabits per second (Tbit/s).Includes optical UltraScale inter-chassis links (ICLs) to help simplify scale-out designs for multi-chassis architectures.

Brocade 6510 -48-port 16 Gbit/s. Switch is designed for virtualized applications and high performance storage including SSD arrays.

1860 Fabric Adapter – First adapter in the industry to include AnyIO 16 Gbit/s Fiber Channel Host Bus Adapter (HBA), 10GbE CAN and 10GbE NIC functionality on the same card.

In March 2013, Brocade launched another Gen 5 Fiber Channel switch, the 6520.  This is a 96-port high-density switch.Along with the new switch, Brocade also announced Brocade Fabric Vision Technology that introduces advanced diagnostics monitoring and management capabilities through a combination of ASIC, FOS, and Brocade Network Advisor.  The Brocade 6520 switch features Brocade Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite (MAPS) for fabric-wide threshold configuration.  This switch also features Brocade Flow Vision for data flow monitoring and analysis.

Vibrant Technologies buys and sells used Brocade switch hardware models.  Our knowledgeable sales reps are here to help you with all your Brocade buying and selling needs.  Contact Us today or Request a Quote.