Brocade 7500 SAN Router BR-7500-0001-A Datenbogen

FiBRE CHANNEl ROUtiNg FOR  

ENHANCED OPERAtiONAl 

EFFiCiENCY 

Featuring a hierarchical Fibre Channel
routing architecture for improved scalability
and fault isolation, along with multivendor
interoperability, the Brocade 7500 helps
maximize the value of existing SAN
investments while streamlining new SAN
implementation. during deployment,
organizations can easily interconnect
individual SANs using their current
addressing schemes. This approach helps
minimize downtime and risk while lowering
overall management costs.

Although the SANs are physically connected,
organizations can control which devices
are shared to ensure the appropriate
level of SAN fabric isolation. As a result,
the Brocade 7500 supports faster, easier
topology changes that enable organizations
to take advantage of new solutions that
reduce costs or increase productivity.
Moreover, simplified device sharing helps 
overcome the logistical challenges and
organizational boundaries that often exist
among departmental SANs.

By providing such a highly scalable
approach for extending SAN infrastructures,
the Brocade 7500 supports key business
objectives such as:

• Migrating from old to new SANs
• Consolidating data centers and

rebalancing storage resources

• Migrating from test to production networks
• Moving equipment on and off lease

PERFORMANCE-OPtiMiZED  

sAN EXtENsiON

One of the key advantages of the Brocade
7500 is its ability to extend the benefits 
of existing SAN infrastructures across the
enterprise. Combined with Fibre Channel
routing, SAN extension enhances resource
sharing and data movement between
departmental SANs or local data centers
while isolating SANs from IP WANs to
minimize risk and potential disruption.

For SAN extension over native Fibre
Channel, the Brocade 7500 utilizes
Brocade Extended Fabrics capabilities. SAN
extension can reach up to 100 kilometers
at 4 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel speeds, 250 
kilometers at 2 Gbit/sec speeds, and 
more than 500 kilometers at 1 Gbit/sec 
speeds. To maximize performance across
native Fibre Channel links, the Brocade
7500 provides unique write acceleration
capabilities, including Fast Write for Fibre
Channel-based extension.

For SAN extension over IP WANs, the
Brocade 7500 provides unique
bandwidth-maximizing FCIP features
that optimize performance:

• hardware-based compression and

IPSec encryption

• Extensive port buffering
• Line-rate Gigabit Ethernet performance 

with support for jumbo packets

• Scalable fan-in of multiple distant SANs
• Write acceleration (Fast Write for FCIP)

capabilities for synchronous applications

• Tape acceleration (Tape Pipelining)

for maximizing performance over
high latencies

• Extended WAN statistics and analysis tools

for bandwidth, latency, and packet loss

• Eight virtual FCIP tunnels per port, each

with its own unique traffic-shaping and 
QoS capabilities, for maximum scalability
and utilization of WAN resources

The Brocade 7500 also supports FICON

®

SAN extension over FCIP. This combined
Fibre Channel routing and FCIP approach
enables a more secure and reliable
distance-connectivity solution for strategic
initiatives such as business continuance,
site mirroring, replication, and data migration.