Brocade HBAs

Initially announced last year, the Brocade line of HBAs has now been revamped to reflect the vendor's centrally managed and 8 Gb/sec end-to-end SAN communications vision. The new cards--offered in 4 Gb/sec and 8 Gb/sec flavors--all support the vendor's Advanced Fabric Services, enabling the centralized management and control of such features as target rate limiting, frame-based prioritization, and virtual ports. Brocade offers their Host Connectivity Manager (HCM) for local or remote management of the cards, including native GUI and CLI tools; as well as open APIs (SNIA-HBA-API 2.0 and FDMI-II) for 3rd party tool integrations.

The cards are offered in two pairs: The 415 (single port) and 425 (dual port), which boast 4 Gb/sec ports (backwards compatible to 1/2 Gb/sec); and the 815/825 (also single/dual port) with 8 Gb/sec ports (backward compatible to 2/4 Gb/sec connections). Both card pairs are low-profile MD2 form factor PCI Express cards; with identical features (apart from the port speeds themselves).

Performance-wise, the cards leverage an FC to PCIe 2.0 Gen2 bus interface with "intelligent lane negotiation" and parallel I/O engines (for simultaneous I/O transfers), driving overall performance to 500,000 IOPS per port and full duplex throughput of 800 and 1600 MB/sec, respectively. Additionally, N_Port trunking is supported enabling both ports on dual port cards to be joined into a single logical link with 1M IOPS and up to 3200 MB/sec throughput.

Other features include:

- Fabric-based boot LUN discovery

- FC-ping, FC-Traceroute, and LED port beaconing

- FC-SP security for device authentication and on-chip, in-flight AES-GCM data encryption

- NPIV (N_Port ID Virtualization) support for 255 virtual ports

- Support for SCSI-FCP and FCP-2 protocols

- Support for point-to-point or switched fabric topologies

General availability of the cards is expected in June of 2008. Contact Brocade Communications Systems for further details.