DATA SHEET HIGHLIGHTS • Accelerates data replication across data centers to meet recovery objectives and secure data flows over distance • Consolidates Fibre Channel and IP storage replication traffic within a single blade with flexible multiprotocol port connectivity • Connects more Fibre Channel and IP devices with industry-leading port density and “scale as you grow" flexibility • Centralizes management of Fibre Channel and IP storage extension traffic while extending Brocade Fabric Vision technology over distance for greater control and insight • Extends proactive monitoring and alerting between data centers to automatically detect WAN anomalies and simplify troubleshooting of end-to-end IO flows over distance, avoiding unplanned downtime • Provides load balancing and network resilience with Extension Trunking and Adaptive Rate Limiting to increase WAN utilization and protect against WAN link failures • Achieves always-on business operations with non-disruptive firmware upgrades and maximizes availability with redundant, hot-pluggable chassis components Controller environment Purpose-Built Extension Solution for Business Resiliency Connecting distributed data centers enables data mobility for advanced data protection. Today’s IT organizations are under pressure to keep pace with the growing avalanche of data traffic between data centers and the changes driven by virtualized application workloads within Fibre Channel and IP storage environments. Also faced with rising Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements and recovery expectations, enterprise data centers need their disaster recovery infrastructure to ensure fast, continuous, and easy replication of mission-critical data to anywhere in the world. Storage administrators therefore need to replicate large amounts of data quickly, securely, reliably, and simply while minimizing operational and capital expenses. To address this challenge, the Brocade® SX6 Extension Blade with Brocade Fabric Vision™ technology, designed for the Brocade X6 Director, provides a Fibre Channel and IP storage replication solution that moves more data over distance faster, delivers security without compromising performance, and scales to support the world’s most demanding environments. This solution delivers industry-leading performance, strong security, continuous availability, unmatched flexibility, and simplified operations to handle the unrelenting transfer of data between data centers and to maintain SLAs. A purpose-built data center extension solution for Fibre Channel and IP storage environments, the Brocade SX6 blade is designed for high-speed, secure transport of data between data centers while maintaining uptime. This enterprise-class solution enables storage and mainframe administrators to optimize and manage the use of WAN bandwidth, secure data over distance, and minimize the impact of disruptions to help ensure replication objectives are met. Accelerating Performance over Distance to Meet Recovery Objectives The Brocade SX6 Extension Blade is an ideal platform for building a high-performance data center extension infrastructure for replication and backup

Synchronous and Asynchronous Replication Centralized Backup and Archiving Central Backup Site Figure 1: The Brocade SX6 Extension Blade provides scalable deployment options to extend Fibre Channel and IP storage replication over long distance for disaster recovery and data protection. solutions (see Figure 1). It leverages any type of inter-data center WAN transport to extend open systems and mainframe storage applications over any distance. Without the use of extension, those distances are often impossible or impractical. The advanced performance—up to 80 Gbps per blade—and network optimization...

• Adaptive Rate Limiting: Dynamically adjusts bandwidth sharing between minimum and maximum rate limits to optimize bandwidth utilization and maintain maximum WAN performance during disruptions. • Advanced compression architecture: Provides multiple modes to optimize compression ratios for various throughput requirements. • FCIP Fast Write (FCIP-FW): Accelerates SCSI write processing, maximizing performance of synchronous and asynchronous replication applications across high-latency WAN connections over any distance. • Open Systems Tape Pipelining (OSTP): Accelerates read and write tape processing...

Brocade extends proactive monitoring between data centers through MAPS and Flow Vision to automatically detect WAN anomalies. With real-time information, administrators can pinpoint and isolate the issue to either its storage or network device to accelerate troubleshooting and avoid unplanned downtime. Flexible and Scalable Multiprotocol Connectivity Solution for Disaster Recovery The Brocade SX6 Extension Blade provides flexible Fibre Channel and IP storage replication deployment options within the Brocade X6 Director, integrating seamlessly with Fibre Channel blades or providing standalone...

administrators to consolidate IO flows from heterogeneous devices and multiple protocols. The consolidation of these applications into a single, managed tunnel between data centers across the WAN has real operational, availability, security, and performance value. IP extension supports a range of commonly used storage applications, such as array native IP Remote Data Replication (RDR), IP-based centralized backup, VM replication, host-based and database replication over IP, NAS head replication between data centers, and data migration between data centers. Simplify Management over Distance for...

- Flow Generator: Provides a built-in traffic generator for pretesting and validating storage extension infrastructure-including route verification, QoS zone setup, extension trunking configuration, WAN access, IPsec policy setting, and integrity of optics, cables, and ports—for robustness before deploying applications. • Forward Error Correction (FEC): Enables recovery from bit errors in ISLs, enhancing transmission reliability and performance. • Credit Loss Recovery: Helps overcome performance degradation and congestion due to buffer credit loss. Brocade Network Advisor Brocade Network Advisor...