I have recently completed a 2GB SAN Fabric upgrade to 8GB on Brocade switches and came across two issues.

The biggest issue and the one that caused me greatest consternation was the fact that Brocade have hard-coded all the new FC switches to accept only Brocade branded SFP modules.  Now this isn’t that big a problem for your shortwave connections due to the fact that the SFP modules you already own are probably not 8GB capable so you’ll have ordered new SFP modules at the same time as ordering the switch.  However, it is entirely feasible that any Longwave SFP modules you currently own are 4GB capable (which is equivalent speed to any Brocade LW SFPs) and thought you might be able to reutilise them and save a few grand.  You can’t!

Basically if you issue an SFP show command and any of the SFP Modules are listed as anything other than BROCADE under the Vendor ID, then they will not work in the new 8GB FC Switches.

The second issue is actually an IBM related problem and if you have ordered the SAN24B (8GB) Express then it doesn’t come with the capability of using E-Ports (ISLs).  I found this out the hard way as well, so save yourself a lot of irritation and don’t order the ‘Express’ version of the any of the new IBM 8GB fibre switches because in the long run there is nothing express about them!

As someone that implements Brocades SANs on a semi-regular basis, I thought I’d stop by their stand and see if they had anything interesting on show and it turns out they did.

The project I am currently working on has a number of Brocade fabrics (4) after adding 3 new ones and managing them would have been a pain if not for Data Center Fabric Manger.  However, there is one massive limitation with DCFM and that’s the free version only manages a single fabric.  ‘What do you expect for free?’ I hear you cry, well I expect the jump up from the free version to be a bit more incremental than it currently is.  If you want to upgrade you can, to the Enterprise, which will cost you a substantial £30k list.  Now this is not bad if you push Enterprise to its limits (1000 ports in a single fabric), but what if you only have 200 ports?  well Brocade have obviously noticed this discrepency and are releasing a middle level version and are hoping to release in the next few months.

Something else of interest was the vCenter plugin that connects directly with Data Centere Fabric Manager and can trigger actions within vCenter based on policies set at the fabric level.  If an HBA’s bandwidth becomes saturated, a policy can send an alert to vCenter to move it to a host with greater HBA bandwidth availability.

All very neat stuff and the demo worked, so check it out if you deal with Brocade kit.

I work with IBM kit a lot and have always found the IBM Redbooks incredibly useful.

You can find a multitude of useful documents over at the home of Redbooks on all kinds of topics.