Many of today's IT organizations have already implemented multiple Storage Area Networks (SANs) to support specific applications, projects, and sites throughout their enterprise. Now they are seeking ways to leverage those SANs for greater efficiency, improved data access, and business continuity requirements. With the Brocade 7500 extension switch, these organizations can now interconnect and extend their SANs for greater resource utilization, scalability, and data protection. By providing this advanced level of connectivity without the associated risk and complexity of physically merging SAN islands into a single large fabric, the Brocade 7500 supports strategic business initiatives such as disaster recovery, data migration, data center infrastructures, and ongoing technology upgrades.
The Brocade 7500 combines 4 Gbit/second Fiber Channel switching and routing capabilities with powerful hardware-assisted traffic forwarding for Fiber Channel over IP (FCIP). It features 16 Fiber Channel ports and two 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports - delivering high performance to run storage applications at line-rate speed with either protocol. By integrating these services in a single platform, the Brocade 7500 offers a wide range of benefits for storage and SAN connectivity, including SAN scaling, long-distance extension, greater resource sharing, and simplified management.