Brocade Communication Systems SilkWorm 3800
Brocade dominates the midrange Fibre Channel switch market, and the SilkWorm 3800 has many features and a strong GUI. It's a bigger unit than the competitors' switches, and its ports are set in a single row, sensibly numbered from left to right. Perhaps these facts alone justify the SilkWorm 3800's $25,000 street price, because the unit's performance, while mostly fine, doesn't bear out the premium over QLogic's and McData's prices.
Our SilkWorm 3800 turned in some incongruous test results. At very small frame sizes, Brocade had both latency and throughput problems. Furthermore, when we ran our full-mesh latency test, the numbers were appalling. The latency at maximum frame size was seven to eight times that of the Sphereon 4500 and SANbox 2, respectively. At the smallest frame size, latency was 85 times that of the Sphereon 4500 and 211 times that of the SANbox 2.
Brocade's representative said the numbers we got at 100 percent load measured buffer latency. He added that the switch has extra buffer credits that are dynamically allocated, and as such, the sending device does not need to throttle in response to a lack of buffer credits. Instead, the originator can use the extra credits to keep sending data, and the latency will occur at the switch. Brocade characterizes this arrangement as a benefit, and claims that SANs with 300 or more nodes can see a performance increase from this dynamic buffering. That explanation sounded plausible, but when we tested further, on uncongested ports with the rest of the switch under 100 percent load, our results didn't improve. Nothing in our testing indicated Brocade's dynamic buffering is a measurable benefit. That leaves us with an unsubstantiated vendor claim.
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