It’s often challenging to handle large amounts of data and demanding workloads regardless of the industry size. This applies to industries ranging from data centers and financial services to healthcare, media, and entertainment.
This is where digital transformation plays a key role in an organization's data management strategy. It can help organizations adapt to change, meet customer needs, and drive growth and innovation.
According to Markets and Markets, the digital transformation market size is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 19.1%, from $521.5 billion in 2021 to $127.5 billion in 2026.
One such company, Broadcom, aims to bridge the gap between vast amounts of data and the increasing demands of IT-skilled professionals.
The firm's solution, Brocade Gen 7, automates storage area networks (SANs), making them smarter and more efficient for organizations to maximize the ROI of their servers.
This article tells you everything you need to know about Broadcom’s Brocade Gen 7, how it works, key features, key benefits, and use cases.
What is Brocade Gen 7?
Brocade Gen 7, developed by Broadcom is a Fibre Channel switch that combines hardware and software design to provide high-performance, reliable, and efficient storage area networks (SANs). It integrates security and autonomous SAN management technologies to power a cyber-resilient network for protection against cyber attacks, IT disruptions, and disasters.
It aims to provide organizations with a cyber-resilient, autonomous SAN solution that unlocks performance capabilities and boosts full optimization of the return on investment (ROI) of their server and storage investments.
Brocade Gen 7's Fibre Channel switch is equipped with a faster speed of 64Gbps, lower latency, and improved capabilities for managing demanding workloads. It is optimized for Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) over Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe), a protocol that enables even greater performance and efficiency for flash-based storage.
The switch’s autonomous SAN management feature leverages machine learning to automate tasks which contributes to performance improvements as well as reduces operational costs. This technology serves as a crucial standpoint for data centers that need high-speed, reliable, and scalable storage solutions.
How does Brocade Gen 7 work?
Brocade Gen 7 uses Fibre Channel technology to deliver faster and more resilient autonomous SAN. It functions by providing a high-speed, reliable, and efficient network that connects storage devices within a data center. It combines analytics and automation capabilities to transform an organization’s network into an autonomous SAN. It provides self-learning, self-optimization, and self-healing.
Gen 7 succeeds Gen 6 with significant improvements, especially in terms of its latency – it nearly halved its latency by going down to 260 nanoseconds. The upgrade delivers 64G speeds and ultra-low latency with an instant performance boost for data-intensive applications and high-performance storage – Storage Class Memory (SCM), All Flash Arrays (AFAs), or NVMe.
The switch allows monitoring, learning, and measuring application data flows across the fabric. Brocade Gen 7 also uses machine learning algorithms to analyze network data, identify anomalies, and automatically implement corrective actions, such as adjusting traffic routing or reconfiguring devices. This allows Brocade Gen 7 to also provide organizations with 50% more buffers per ASIC over Gen 6. It can handle more traffic, provide greater distance, cope with heavy workloads, and manage congestion, keeping traffic flowing reliably.
Overall, Brocade Gen 7 helps organizations optimize their data storage and retrieval processes, improving overall efficiency and performance.
Key features
1. Traffic Optimizer
Brocade Gen 7 has a feature called Brocade Traffic Optimizer that intelligently manages network traffic by proactively grouping traffic over virtual channels. It creates separate performance groups, classifies, and automatically segregates traffic based on factors like speed, latency, and whether it uses NVMe or SCSI protocol.
This reconciles the over-subscription and congestion issues caused by mismatched speeds, allowing an organization to upgrade its infrastructure as per its time and budget.
2. Trusted FOS (TruFOS) Certificate
Brocade Gen 7 allows organizations to employ Brocade Trusted FOS Certificates for FOS authenticity and current entitlement assurance. It’s designed to protect Brocade directors and switches from unauthorized access and tampering. These certificates are digitally signed cryptographic keys that verify the authenticity of the device's operating system and firmware.
Verifying the authenticity of the software allows TruFOS Certification to help prevent unauthorized changes or malware infections that have the potential to compromise the security of the network.
When a Brocade device boots up, it checks the authenticity of the TruFOS Certificate. If the certificate is valid, the device is allowed to operate normally. If the certificate is invalid or missing, the device will refuse to boot, preventing unauthorized access. This helps to ensure that the network remains secure and protected against potential threats.
3. Switch security certificates
Brocade Gen 7 allows organizations to manage switching security certificates easily through a wildcard feature and multiple Subject Alternative Names which automates SSL certificates distribution across the SAN with Brocade SANnav.
The framework’s capabilities enable it to enhance certificate support for secure communications and also issue alerts in case of expiring switch certificates through MAPS. These capabilities allow it to improve certificate support for secure communications and automatically send notifications through MAPS when switch certificates are nearing expiration, helping to prevent potential security breaches and disruptions.
4. End-to-end virtual machine (VM) visibility and insight
Brocade Gen 7 integrates Brocade VM Insight and VMID+ – tools that deliver automatic virtual machine (VM) awareness across the entire data path without the need for additional tools. These tools easily integrate with the switch, eradicating the need for separate VM monitoring solutions. The insights sought from VM automatically find and track VMs, allowing the organizations to observe real-time insights into VM performance, resource optimization, and storage allocation.
It links unique identifiers (VMIDs) with VMs which helps VMID+ to improve VM awareness. This also enables for more granular monitoring and management, ultimately resulting in the view of comprehensive VM visibility and automation. This helps organizations optimize the performance and utilization of their virtualized environments.
5. Autonomous SAN
Brocade Gen 7 provides instant speed and support for NVMe and other critical applications through its SAN autonomous feature. This also boosts security, helping maintain highest levels of resilience to cyber attacks. It also provides unique self-learning, self-optimizing, and self-healing capabilities.
Self-learning proactively converts data into actionable insights and automatically detects performance issues. Self-optimization utilizes traffic behavior to automatically make decisions for better traffic prioritization to ensure an organization is running at optimal performance. Self-healing when potential disruptions are detected, the network automatically mitigates or resolves issues without intervention. This helps autonomous SAN will significantly simplify day-to-day management tasks and enable unparalleled network performance.
6. Traffic Congestion with Hardware Congestion Signaling
Brocade Gen 7 has a feature to detect traffic congestion via automatic remediation, helping avoid degradation of application performance from the hardware level. This enables prompt response and more efficient traffic management. When congestion is spotted, the switch acts instantaneously including adjusting traffic priorities, limiting bandwidth, or executing load balancing techniques. As a result, it prevents network bottlenecks and ensures the continuos functioning of vital applications with necessary capabilities.
The feature proactively addresses congestion, enhancing overall network performance and reliability, especially in demanding environments with high traffic volumes.
7. Fabric Performance Impact Notification (FPIN)
Brocade Gen 7 notifies end devices through software or hardware signaling of developing congestion situations so they can take action automatically to avoid or mitigate the issue without requiring admin intervention. Its proactive monitoring and alerting characteristics boost security for an organization’s network and also address potential performance problems within its SAN infrastructure.
FPIN’s constant monitoring of the SAN fabric makes issue detection and response faster. A report on the root cause of the problem is provided, allowing organizations to rapidly detect and resolve performance issues before they have a major impact on the organization’s operations. This helps ensure the ongoing reliability and performance of critical applications and data storage systems.
Key benefits
1. Integrated Security
Brocade Gen 7 integrates security into its design for critical missions starting with verifying the integrity of the hardware and software platforms to make sure that the switch has not been altered, protecting against tampering of the hardware and its boot code.
The switch component has transceiver optics – Small Form Pluggable (SFP) modules are also validated during boot-up to ensure their authenticity to integrate it into an organization’s system.
2. Secure cyber-resilient network
Brocade Gen 7 is designed to ensure security across the Fibre Channel fabrics which are based on controlled access between servers and storage and isolation within the data center. The switch is equipped with characteristics like Brocade Fabric OS (FOS) software that provides integrated security features including Secure Boot, Brocade Trusted FOS (TruFOS) Certificates, and hardening of FOS itself. These further reduce vulnerabilities from malware and hijacking attacks by automatically validating the integrity of the switch operating system, security settings, and hardware.
The Brocade TruFOS Certificates with organizations running Brocade directors and switches are currently covered by support licenses and enabled to perform critical operations securely, so users no longer have to worry about whether the operating system has been tampered with.
Gen 7 also has a Brocade SANnav Management Portal that provides organizational users with the capability to automate the distribution of SSL certificates across the SAN, ensuring authenticity and encryption settings. The characteristic allows administrators to set up monitoring and alerts for security configuration changes, customize security thresholds, provide adequate access control to individual administrators, and view switch security events.
3. Migration to NVMe Connectivity
Brocade Gen 7 can seamlessly migrate to NVMe Connectivity for low-latency NVMe adoption, helping maximize value of investment. It also has the capability to migrate from all-SCSI environments to NVM connectivity without incurring any downtime or disruption while still benefiting from an instant performance boost.
It also offers one of the fastest, easiest, and least disruptive ways to migrate to NVMe, with verified IOPS increases of up to 80%. This increases the performance quality and speed, especially for workloads using all-flash storage.
While the adoption of NVMe connectivity to all-flash arrays can be easily achieved with Gen 7 Fibre Channel, the data paths to the highest-priority, mission-critical workloads are the first to migrate to NVMe-connected all-flash arrays. However, the Tier 2/3 apps continue to run on existing SCSI-based FC connections across the same network. As new connections or devices are added, new paths can be created in a nondisruptive manner to bring up new workloads and migrate existing ones to NVMe.
Use Cases
1. Multigenerational Server and Storage Environments
Brocade Gen 7 addresses performance challenges in mixed-generation scenarios which detects misbehaving devices as well as optimizes traffic flows. When IT environments adopt multiple servers and storage systems from different generations that co-exist with a common storage network, it presents several challenges, especially regarding maintaining optimal performance across an organization’s environment.
This is where Brocade Gen 7 comes in. It identifies which devices are misbehaving and mitigates their adverse impact on other healthy traffic flows by automatically learning network traffic patterns, classifying and segregating traffic based on performance characteristics, and implementing self-healing mechanisms to resolve issues without human intervention.
2. Seasonal and Event-Driven Performance Management
Brocade Gen 7 addresses traffic patterns in a storage network which are often stable owing to the fluctuation of activity cycles, implying their spike during peak periods. These can dramatically go up dial, weekly, or seasonally.
This is why, Gen 7 has been designed to function with consistency even during peak demand. Its architecture and advanced features enable it to handle high traffic volumes and maintain optimal performance under stress. It manages it by identifying and isolating the problem's source, whether it is within the fabric, a storage device, or a slow-drain host or target.
About Broadcom
Broadcom is a global infrastructure technology leader built on more than 60 years of innovation, collaboration, and engineering excellence. With roots based on the rich technical heritage of AT&T/Bell Labs, Lucent, and Hewlett-Packard/Agilent, Broadcom focuses on technologies that connect our world. Through the combination of industry leaders Broadcom, LSI, Broadcom Corporation, Brocade, CA Technologies, Symantec's enterprise security business, and VMware, the company has the size, scope, and engineering talent to lead the industry into the future.
Broadcom is focused on technology leadership and category-leading semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions. The company is a global leader in numerous product segments serving the world’s most successful companies.
