Brocade HBAs

Your customers are looking to virtualise their server and storage environments. They're also looking to consolidate and increase utilisation rates and they want to drive down energy and IT admin costs in the datacentre.

Built to answer these key IT business drivers and designed for the next generation datacentre, it pays to choose Brocade HBAs over the competition.

Brocade are the only vendor to offer hot-swappable optics

70% of HBA failures are due to failed optics. Brocade are the only vendor which allow you to hot-swap a failed optic, meaning that you can replace just the failed optic whilst leaving the server up and running. With other vendors the complete HBA must be replaced requiring the server to be brought down, the HBA removed and replaced, the server rebooted, and then re-zoning and lun masking due to the new WWN on the replaced HBA. Hot-swappable optics save time, allow the server to be kept up and running, and reduce risk for business operations.

Brocade HBAs deliver over twice the number of IOPs of the competition

Delivering 500,000 IOPs per port - over twice the number of IOPs of the competition – Brocade HBAs are able to deliver more with less hardware. Whether this is supporting more VMs per physical server, more applications, or just ensuring that the HBA is not a bottleneck into the SAN as technology moves towards newer and faster multi-core processors. Faster response times will allow critical data centre applications to complete sooner and reduce backup windows.

Brocade HBAs ensure end to end manageability, monitoring and support

By utilising the same toolset as the Brocade fabric, Brocade HBAs make it possible to truly manage end to end, from the VMs to the Storage port. The same support tools are used on both the SAN and server allowing the dove-tailing of logs, statistics and error message - leading to faster resolution and ease of maintenance. Staff only have to learn 1 toolset to effectively manage the end to end solution.

Brocade HBAs enable greater consolidation and ensure quality of service

By extending the fabric services running in the Brocade SAN, the Brocade HBAs are able to apply Quality of Service (QoS) settings to servers and VMs that are portable as the infrastructure changes and VMs are migrated from physical server to server. QoS will prioritise and isolate the data flows from the host through the fabric, and allow VMs to be segregated - leading to greater consolidation.

Brocade HBAs help to optimise the benefits of capital expenditure

Target rate limiting functionality means that you can automatically detect target device speeds and throttle accordingly. The unique ability to manage mixed storage speeds is particularly applicable to environments undergoing migration or refresh or with mixed speeds, where the older slower devices can reduce the throughput of the newly purchased devices, negating the benefits of the capital expenditure.

Brocade HBAs deliver operational savings and significantly reduce risk

Brocade HBAs use “Clean Cards” – a single driver/firmware qualified package, which means that the firmware for the HBA is loaded by the operating system driver each time the operating system starts. Because the HBAs are loaded with the correct version of the firmware for the operating system every time, the possibility of an unqualified or wrong driver/firmware combination is removed. This leads to operational savings and significantly reduces risk, especially when operating systems are upgraded or changed.

Brocade HBAs lead to greater operational control and savings

Boot from SAN configuration settings can be automatically retrieved from a centralised SAN location, so that zero HBA configuration on the server is required. This leads to greater operational control and savings.