Brocade Inter-Switch Link (ISL) Trunking

Brocade Inter-Switch Link (ISL) Trunking enhances switch-to-switch performance, simplifies management, and improves the reliability of datacentre fabrics. It combines up to eight ISLs into a single logical trunk that provides up to 64 Gbit/sec data transfers (with 8 Gbit/sec switches), enabling higher performance for demanding applications.

ISL is ideal for optimising performance and simplifying the management of multi-switch SAN fabrics. When two or more adjacent ISLs in a port group are used to connect two switches with trunking enabled, the switches automatically group the ISLs into single logical ISL, or “trunk.”

ISL Trunking increases performance

ISL Trunking is designed to significantly reduce traffic congestion in storage networks. To balance workload across all of the ISLs in the trunk, each incoming frame is sent across the first available physical ISL in the trunk. As a result, transient workload peaks are much less likely to impact the performance of other parts of the SAN fabric and bandwidth is not wasted by inefficient traffic routing. ISL Trunking can also help simplify fabric design, lower provisioning time, and limit the need for additional ISLs or switches.

Benefit from simplified management and design

In almost any network, management costs increase with complexity - rising with the number of elements being managed. With ISL Trunking, Brocade Fabric OS views the group of physical ISLs as a single logical ISL, a design that:

Lowers the number of entities to manage
Reduces the number of lines on a logical topology map
Improves traffic and capacity provisioning to keep systems and applications running at full speed
Simplifies network design, capacity planning, and fabric administration ISL.

Trunking can be managed through a small number of commands with the Brocade command line interface or through the graphical Brocade Web Tools utility.

Download Brocade ISL Trunking datasheet +

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