Brocade 5000 Switch

Flexibility Protects Your Investments

Common platform speeds deployment

You've got Brocade and McDATA SANs – what you need is a common platform that supports both environments. By providing native E_Port interoperability with Brocade and McDATA fabrics, the Brocade 5000 ensures seamless connectivity and deployment while enhancing datacenters with industry-leading features and performance. The switch is fully compatible with Brocade 1, 2, and 4 Gb/sec devices, and supports Brocade Fabric OS (FOS) and M-Enterprise environments with either Fabric Operation System (for Brocade Fabrics) or Fabric Operating System NI (for McDATA Fabrics).

Versatility reduces cost and complexity

The greater your storage demands, the greater your need to leverage existing investments to reduce the cost of managing and maintaining your SAN deployments. The Brocade 5000 lets you continue to use your existing infrastructure investments while migrating seamlessly to the new switch to meet your expanding storage needs. So you can extend your capital investments and reduce ongoing operational costs.

Looking backward, moving forward

To help protect your existing investments, the Brocade 5000 features full backward and forward compatibility, making it easy for you to integrate and scale your new or existing SANs.

Industry-leading Performance

Reduce congestion and increase bandwidth

Supporting mission-critical environments starts with best-in-class performance. The Brocade 5000 features a non-blocking architecture with as many as 32 ports concurrently active at 4 Gb/sec, providing an aggregate bandwidth of 256 Gb/sec. So you can reduce congestion and increase throughput. What’s more, 8 virtual channels of each ISL enhance Quality of Service traffic prioritization and anti-starvation capabilities at the port level to avoid performance degradation.

Backup to better performance

You already know that using SANs for backup and restore processes can dramatically reduce LAN traffic and provide a wide range of business advantages. The 4 Gb/sec speed of the Brocade 5000 further enhances the benefits SANs bring to data backup by shrinking the time required to perform backups, enabling high-speed, disk-to-disk tape backup, and increasing data availability with backups to remote locations.

Free captive storage

Thanks to the Brocade 5000's interoperability, you can create pools of shared storage for access by heterogeneous host systems, improving storage utilization rates and reducing the amount of captive storage. In addition, the Brocade 5000 enables a single 4 Gb/sec port on a storage system to support twice the number of servers as a 2 Gb/sec port.

Enterprise-class Availability and Scalability

All roads lead to your data

With the Brocade 5000, you can implement redundant SAN switch configurations and create multiple data paths to storage, increasing data availability. Redundant paths also provide data protection and improve performance because they increase the number of channels to the storage device.

High scalability with Ports on Demand

The Brocade 5000 supports mission-critical environments with best-in-class performance for midrange switches. The switch's Ports on Demand capabilities let you scale from 16 ports to 24 or 32 ports, providing you with a modular, pay-as-you-grow approach to business expansion. And with 32 ports concurrently active at 4 Gb/sec, the switch provides an aggregate bandwidth of 256 Gb/sec.

Uptime all the time

To help you keep your business up and running, the Brocade 5000 comes with enterprise-class availability features that comprise a solid foundation for disaster recovery and business continuity, including hot-swappable, redundant, and integrated fan and power-supply assemblies. In addition, hot code load and activation maximize application uptime with faster system upgrades and maintenance, reducing the dependency on scheduled outages.

Protects data over distance

And since your data may be stored in datacenters that are miles apart, the Brocade 5000 supports distances up to 500 kilometers at 1 Gb/sec and 125 kilometers at 4 Gb/sec, facilitating deployment of long-distance SAN initiatives, such as datacenter consolidation.