Brocade Advanced Accelerator

The Brocade company announced in December, 2010 that IBM qualified Brocade Advanced Accelerator for FICON® in relation to solutions of Brocade of the last generation which are intended for increase in extent of storage area networks (SAN), used for connection of geographically distributed data processing centers. This new solution optimizes performance of applications for the mainframes covering several data processing centers. It allows customers to place more effectively the applications requiring high capacity of a communication channel between centers of data processing, such as replications of data and servers of virtual tape drives (VTS).

For cloud computing the geographically distributed architecture of data storage crucial and at the same time difficult for implementation even more often are required. The concept of Brocade One is a plan of Brocade for creation of products and solutions which allow to place applications and information in any place using technology experience and leadership of Brocade.

FICON is a high-speed interface of input-output for connection of mainframes with data storage devices. Brocade Advanced Accelerator for FICON provides the highest performance in the industry and serves as the most reliable solution when using networks 1 and 10 of Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) for connection of mainframes using Fibre Channel over IP technology (FCIP) at a great distance. These solutions are applied to connection and building of storage area networks practically at any distances in such crucial applications as data backup, disaster recovery and ensuring business continuity.

Brocade Advanced Accelerator for FICON based on the solutions Brocade 7800 Extension Switch and Brocade FX8-24 Extension Blade is intended for connection of mainframes of IBM with the remote virtual server of the tape drives TS7700 IBM Virtualization Engine. Brocade Advanced Accelerator for FICON helps clients to reduce time of backup and recovery and to reduce operating costs. The solution developed especially for the IBM z/OS Global Mirror environment (XRC) allows them to save crucial resources of the natural disasters given in remote places on a case and for the purpose of ensuring business continuity.

Brocade Advanced Accelerator for FICON increases efficiency due to use of methods of emulation for reduction or an exception of performance penalties of applications for mainframes during the work in geographically distributed networks Ethernet/IP of big extent. Customers can get such advantages as:

• the increased speed of a read and write of FICON at long distances,
• the improved data protection at meeting requirements for recovery,
• acceleration of backup operations and postdisaster recovery,
• smaller use of bandwidth and lower cost of WAN,
• support of new solutions with protection of the existing investments.