"The SilkWorm 4100 will come to market at prices comparable to 2-Gbit Fibre Channel, so why not purchase twice the speed at the same price?" asked Jay Kidd, Brocade's CTO. He added that new host bus adapters are expected early next year, and LTO-3 tape drives should come to market by June 2005.
Brocade also released a new version of its Fabric Operating System for the entire line of SilkWorm SAN switches and directors. Fabric OS 4.4 boasts faster data transfer rates over longer distances, higher port density for greater scalability within existing fabrics, improved network management, better security and FICON Control Unit Port (CUP) support for mainframe environments.
Fabric OS 4.4 now supports individual links as long as 500 kilometers and inter-switch trunking of up to 50 kilometers for 4-Gbit trunks and 25 kilometers for 8-Gbit trunks; that gives customers greater bandwidth efficiency, reduced backup times, and faster recovery, according to the vendor.
In addition, the Fabric OS enables increased port density so that fabric architectures can be scaled to as many as 50 domains, and when combined with the Brocade SilkWorm Multiprotocol Router, it can support routed fabrics or "meta-SANs" of more than 10,000 ports.
The new OS also supports FDMI host naming, which provides a detailed view of switches and servers for capacity planning and real-time analysis purposes. The OS also does load balancing via a Dynamic Path Selection feature. Color-coded pictures identify the general health of individual switches and their performance.
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