Technical data

Introducing the Brocade 7840 Extension Switch

● Overview of Brocade 7840 Extension Switch................................................................. 11

● Port side of the switch..................................................................................................... 13

● Nonport side of the switch...............................................................................................14

● Switch management........................................................................................................16

Overview of Brocade 7840 Extension Switch

The Brocade 7840 Extension Switch is intended as a platform for Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP). This

enables transmission of Fibre Channel data over long distances by way of IP networks by wrapping

Fibre Channel frames in IP packets. Each end of the FCIP communication path must be a compatible

FCIP device.

The switch can operate independently or in a fabric containing multiple extension switches.

Brocade 7840 software features

The Brocade 7840 provides the following software features:

• Multiple logical FCIP tunnels with maximum tunnel bandwidth up to 20Gbps allow for scalable

connectivity between sites. Note that the 7840 does not support FCIP connectivity with any other

products including the Brocade 7800 and FX8-24.

• FCIP Trunking feature allows multiple IP source and destination address pairs (defined as FCIP

circuits) via multiple 1/10GbE or 40GbE interfaces to provide high bandwidth FCIP tunnel and

lossless failover resiliency. In addition, each FCIP circuit supports four QoS classes (Class-F, High,

Medium and Low Priority), each as a TCP connection.

• ARL feature meets minimum bandwidth guarantee for each tunnel while making the full utilization of

the available network bandwidth without adverse throughput performance impact at high traffic load.

• Hardware-based compression delivers the ability to maximize throughput over lower bandwidth links

in the wide area network, optimizing the cost efficiencies of FCIP. The 7840 compresses FC frames

before they are encapsulated into FCIP packets.

• Key protocol features are enabled in the FCIP implementation to optimize performance of Extension

over IP networks, including FX8-24 and WAN Optimized TCP (WO-TCP), 9K jumbo frame and end-

to-end Path MTU auto discovery.

• Hardware-based IPsec supports mix of secure and non-secure tunnels on the same Ethernet port,

jumbo frames, and VLAN tagged connections. The Brocade 7840 IPsec function is capable of

supporting both IPv4 and IPv6.

• FastWrite, Open Systems Tape Pipelining and Advanced Accelerator for FICON mitigate the latency

effect of a long distance FCIP distance connection over IP WAN.

• FCIP HCL (Hot Code Load) provides In-service firmware upgrade for supporting 24/7 non-stop

business operations

• Built-in WAN link tester generates traffic over an IP connection to test for maximum throughput,

congestion, loss percentage, out of order deliver, latency, and other network conditions. It helps

determine the health of a WAN link before deploying it for use.

• Fabric Vision advanced monitoring provides the following functions:

Brocade 7840 Extension Switch Hardware Reference Manual

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