Technical data

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. Page 8 of 48
2. TOE Description
The Target of Evaluation (TOE) is the Brocade Directors and Switches hardware appliances running FabricOS
version 7.2.0a. The various models of the TOE mentioned in Section 1.1 differ in performance, form factor and
number of ports, but all run the same FabricOS version 7.2.0a software. The TOE is available in three form factors:
a rack-mount Director chassis with a variable number of blades, a self-contained switch appliance device and
embedded blades acting as a switch.
Director models are composed of blades of several types. A ‘director blade model’ is either a control blade (CP4 or
CP8), a core switch blade (CR8 or CR4S-8, CR16-4, CR16-8), a port blade (FC4-16, FC4-32, FC4-48, FC8-16,
FC8-32, FC8-48, FC8-64, FC16-32, FC16-48) or an application blade (FC4-16IP, FX8-24, FCOE10-24, FS8-18).
Control blades contain the control plane for the chassis. A core switch blade contains the ASICs for switching
between port blades. A port blades support various numbers of ports and speeds. Application blades provide
additional capabilities such as FC over Ethernet or encryption. The DCX, DCX-4S, DCX 8510-4 and DCX 8510-8
require at least one control blade and one core blade to make the director operational.
Director Model
Blades
DCX
CP8, CR8, FC8-16, FC8-32, FC8-48, FC8-64, FX8-24,
FCOE10-24, FS8-18
DCX-4S
CP8, CR4S-8, FC8-16, FC8-32, FC8-48, FC8-64, FC10-6,
FX8-24, FCOE10-24, FS8-18
DCX 8510-4
CP8, CR16-4, FC8-64, FC16-32, FC16-48, FX8-24, FS8-18
DCX 8510-8
CP8, CR16-8, FC8-64, FC16-32, FC16-48, FX8-24, FS8-18
Brocade Directors and Switches are hardware appliances that implement what is called a “Storage Area Network” or
“SAN”. SANs provide physical connections between machines in the environment containing a type of network
card called a Host Bus Adapter (HBA) that are located in the environment and storage devices such as disk storage
systems and tape libraries that are also located in the environment. The network connection between the storage
devices in the environment, the TOE, and HBAs in the environment use high-speed network hardware. SANs are
optimized to transfer large blocks of data between HBAs and storage devices. SANs can be used to replace or
supplement server-attached storage solutions, for example.
The basic concept of operations from a user’s perspective is depicted below. Actual implementation may
interconnect multiple instances of TOE models.
Figure 1: Host bus adapters can only access storage devices that are members of the same zone.