Brocade Communications Systems Inc. began priming the 8 Gbps pump
today with the revelation that it has shipped 8 Gbit blades for its
SilkWorm 48000 directors to its OEM storage partners for
qualification.
What Brocade isn't discussing yet is a new director, code-named
Neptune, which uses the same 8 Gbit blades and will become the
flagship of its
storage area network (SAN) and data center product line.
Although Brocade executives aren't ready to discuss the new switch
yet, industry sources said it is also getting certified by Brocade
partners, such as EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and IBM. The
8 Gbit Silkworm blades and the new director are expected to be
ready to ship to customers by the middle of 2008.
Brocade execs consider Neptune a new class of switch rather than a
typical Fibre Channel SAN director. According an internal document
obtained by SearchStorage, Neptune is a multiprotocol director that
will replace the i10k and 6140 directors Brocade acquired from
McData. The device will support 8-gig and 4-gig Fibre Channel,
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and 10-gig Ethernet.
Brocade will build in fabric services such as quality of
service, virtualization, per port routing, encryption and data
protection on intelligent blades although not all of the features
will be available when the director begins shipping. Brocade
describes Neptune as a "768-port data center fabric core," but that
port count comes from trunking two directors. Brocade portrays the
director as the key to providing its answer to Cisco's Data Center
3.0 initiative launched a few months ago, consisting of
storage and server virtualization and other storage and
networking services.
But Neptune won't be announced until later this month. "We're
not announcing any new director this week," said Brocade
spokeswoman Michelle Lindeman.
This week, Brocade is talking about 16-, 32- and 48-port blades
that plug into the SilkWorm 48000 and native interoperability
between the 48000, and switches and directors it acquired by
gobbling up rival McData Corp. last January.
Brocade's 8 Gbit plans are in line with those of host bus
adapter (HBA) vendors Emulex Corp. and QLogic Corp., which said
they expect storage OEM partners to have their 8 Gbps HBAs in
customers' hands by the middle of next year. Brocade is also
planning an 8 Gbit series of HBAs that will likely ship in
mid-2008. Brocade's major switch rival Cisco has been quiet on 8
Gbit. Cisco didn't market
4 Gbit switches until more than a year after
Brocade offered upgrades from 2 Gbit to 4 Gbit.
While Brocade hopes to get the jump on Cisco for customers going
from 4 Gbit to 8 Gbit, most people in the storage industry expect
slower adoption of 8 Gbit devices that 4 Gbit for two reasons.
First, 8 Gbit switches will bring a steeper price premium than 4
Gbit did over 2 Gbit because they require different optics.
Conservative estimates say 8 Gbit devices will cost 15% above 4
Gbit. The second reason for slower adoption is many customers are
happy with 4 Gbit and will be in no hurry to pay that premium to
upgrade.
Is Brocade premature with its 8 Gbit rollout?
"That's the fun question," said Bill Dunmire, Brocade senior
product marketing manager. "I think you'll see three drivers of 8
Gbit next year. First, 8 Gbit mainframe support is coming in 2008
and customers who want to move to 8 Gbit mainframes will need 8
Gbit fabric. There's also a pent-up demand for LTO-5 tape drives
and 8 Gbit will help people get better performance. The third
driver is interswitch links [ISL]. With 8 Gbit you can double the
bandwidth reduction for ISLs by 50%."
It remains to be seen if any of those drivers will spur
mainstream 8 Gbit adoption. Roger Wilson, systems and networking
manager at Mercy Medical Center in Des Moines, Iowa, said he is
content at 2 Gbit. And Wilson went through a major SAN upgrade last
year, adding Cisco MDS 9509 directors and IBM DS6800 and DS4800
storage systems to replicate his data-intensive Picture Archival
and Control System (PACS) images from the main data center to a
secondary disaster recovery site.
"At some point, we'll upgrade to 4 Gbit but it's not on our
radar at this point," Wilson said. "We're not fully pressed yet at
2 Gbit."