Brocade SX6 Extension Blade Datasheet
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DATA SHEET Brocade SX6 Extension Blade Purpose-Built Extension Solution for Business Resiliency Connecting distributed data centers enables data mobility for advanced data protection. Today’s IT organizations are under pressure to keep HIGHLIGHTS pace with the growing avalanche of data traffic between data centers • Accelerates data replication across data and the changes driven by virtualized application workloads within Fibre centers to meet recovery objectives and Channel and IP storage environments. Also faced with rising Service secure data flows over distance Level Agreement (SLA) requirements and recovery expectations, • Consolidates Fibre Channel and IP enterprise data centers need their disaster recovery infrastructure to storage replication traffic within a single ensure fast, continuous, and easy replication of mission-critical data blade with flexible multiprotocol port to anywhere in the world. Storage administrators therefore need to connectivity replicate large amounts of data quickly, securely, reliably, and simply • Connects more Fibre Channel and IP devices with industry-leading port density while minimizing operational and capital expenses. and “scale as you grow” flexibility • Centralizes management of Fibre To address this challenge, the Brocade® environments, the Brocade SX6 blade Channel and IP storage extension traffic SX6 Extension Blade with Brocade is designed for high-speed, secure while extending Brocade Fabric Vision Fabric Vision™ technology, designed transport of data between data centers technology over distance for greater for the Brocade X6 Director, provides a while maintaining uptime. This enterprise- control and insight Fibre Channel and IP storage replication class solution enables storage and • Extends proactive monitoring and alerting solution that moves more data over mainframe administrators to optimize between data centers to automatically distance faster, delivers security without and manage the use of WAN bandwidth, detect WAN anomalies and simplify compromising performance, and secure data over distance, and minimize troubleshooting of end-to-end IO flows scales to support the world’s most the impact of disruptions to help ensure over distance, avoiding unplanned demanding environments. This solution replication objectives are met. downtime delivers industry-leading performance, • Provides load balancing and network strong security, continuous availability, Accelerating Performance resilience with Extension Trunking and unmatched flexibility, and simplified over Distance to Meet Adaptive Rate Limiting to increase WAN operations to handle the unrelenting Recovery Objectives utilization and protect against WAN link transfer of data between data centers and The Brocade SX6 Extension Blade is failures to maintain SLAs. an ideal platform for building a high- • Achieves always-on business operations performance data center extension A purpose-built data center extension with non-disruptive firmware upgrades infrastructure for replication and backup and maximizes availability with redundant, solution for Fibre Channel and IP storage hot-pluggable chassis components Controller environment Synchronous and Centralized Backup Asynchronous Replication and Archiving IP WAN IP WAN Primary Secondary Central Backup Site Site Site Figure 1: The Brocade SX6 Extension Blade provides scalable deployment options to extend Fibre Channel and IP storage replication over long distance for disaster recovery and data protection. solutions (see Figure 1). It leverages and tape protocol acceleration, WAN- • PerPriority TCP Quality of Service any type of inter-data center WAN optimized TCP, and other extension (PTQ): Provides high-, medium-, and transport to extend open systems and networking technologies. Advanced low-priority handling of Fibre Channel mainframe storage applications over any features and technologies include: and Brocade IP Extension flows within distance. Without the use of extension, the same tunnel for transmission over • IPsec: Ensures secure transport over those distances are often impossible or the WAN using autonomous, individual WAN links by encrypting data-in- impractical. TCP sessions per QoS priority. flight with the hardware-implemented The advanced performance—up to 80 standard 256-bit AES algorithm without • Extension Trunking: Combines multiple Gbps per blade—and network optimization a performance penalty or excessive WAN connections into a single, logical, features of the Brocade SX6 Extension added latency. high-bandwidth trunk, providing active Blade enable replication and backup load balancing and network resilience to • Unparalleled, extremely efficient applications to move more data over protect against WAN link failures. architecture: Uniquely permits the metro and WAN links in less time, and high-speed, low-latency processing • Lossless Link Loss (LLL): Is part of optimize available WAN bandwidth. In of IP datagrams and Fibre Channel/ Extension Trunking, providing recovery addition, the Brocade SX6 secures data FICON® frames, making extension of of data lost in-flight when a link goes flows over distance with no performance synchronous applications possible. offline. From the perspective of the penalty to minimize exposure to storage applications, nothing ever data breaches between data centers. • WAN-optimized TCP: Offers an happened because all data is delivered— Supporting up to 250 ms Round-Trip aggressive TCP stack, optimizing TCP and delivered in order. Time (RTT) latency, the Brocade SX6 window size and flow control, and enables extension over distances up to accelerating TCP transport for high • Failover/failback with failover groups: 37,500 kilometers (23,400 miles). throughput storage applications. Circuits are assigned metrics and put in a failover group. If all circuits of the The Brocade SX6 Extension Blade • Streams: Is a feature of WAN- lower metric within the failover group maximizes utilization of WAN links optimized TCP and used with Brocade go offline, the higher metric circuits through protocol optimization technology IP Extension to prevent Head-of-Line take over. This uses LLL, and all data and expands WAN bandwidth with Blocking (HoLB) across the WAN. is delivered and delivered in order. The hardware-based compression, disk storage application will not know that a failover/failback has occurred. 2 • Adaptive Rate Limiting: Dynamically Channel, consistently delivering 99.9999 network paths, and proper setup of adjusts bandwidth sharing between percent uptime in the world’s most configurations prior to deployment. In minimum and maximum rate limits demanding data centers. The Brocade addition, administrators can troubleshoot to optimize bandwidth utilization and X6 Director delivers enterprise-class the physical infrastructure to ease maintain maximum WAN performance availability features, such as hot-pluggable deployment and avoid potential issues. during disruptions. chassis components with non-disruptive To protect against WAN link failure and software upgrades to maximize • Advanced compression architecture: avoid restart or resync events, the Brocade application uptime and minimize outages. Provides multiple modes to optimize SX6 Extension Blade leverages Brocade This combines director-class availability compression ratios for various WAN-optimized TCP to ensure in-order with Brocade SX6 innovative extension throughput requirements. lossless transmission of data. In addition, features and the industry’s only WAN- the Brocade SX6 with Extension Trunking • FCIP Fast Write (FCIP-FW): Accelerates side, non-disruptive firmware upgrades protects against WAN link failures with SCSI write processing, maximizing to achieve always-on business operations tunnel redundancy for lossless path performance of synchronous and and maximize application uptime. These failover and guaranteed in-order data asynchronous replication applications unique capabilities enable a high- delivery using LLL. The advanced across high-latency WAN connections performance and highly reliable network Extension Trunking feature allows multiple over any distance. infrastructure for disaster recovery and network paths to be used simultaneously. data protection. • Open Systems Tape Pipelining When there is a failure for a network path, (OSTP): Accelerates read and write tape Extension Trunking will automatically processing over distance, significantly retransmit the lost packets over a non- reducing backup and recovery times BROCADE SX6 EXTENSION BLADE: affected WAN link to maintain overall data over distance anywhere in the world. DELIVERING BUSINESS RESILIENCY integrity. The replication application will be AT SCALE • Advanced Accelerator for FICON: Uses protected and continue with no disruption. The Brocade SX6 Extension Blade is advanced networking technologies, data To maintain replication application a multiprotocol extension solution that management techniques, and protocol securely moves more data over distance performance during failure situations, intelligence to accelerate IBM zGlobal faster, while scaling to support the world’s the Brocade SX6 features Adaptive Rate Mirror (zGM), mainframe tape read most demanding environments. With Limiting that uses dynamic bandwidth and write operations, and z/OS host Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel, IP extension sharing between minimum (floor) and capability, and Brocade Fabric Vision connections to Teradata warehousing maximum (ceiling) rate limits. With systems over distance. technology, this platform delivers industry- leading performance,