Brocade SilkWorm 48000 Director

With state-of-the-art performance and enhanced scalability for open system and IBM mainframe enterprise SAN environments, the Brocade SilkWorm 48000 Director provides unique capabilities to meet the full spectrum of mission-critical requirements. It scales non-disruptively from 32 to as many as 384 concurrently active 4 Gbit/sec full-duplex ports in a single domain. In addition, it supports Fibre Channel routing, FCIP, and iSCSI, and is designed for future applications and higher-speed options.

Reliable Foundation for Core-to-Edge SANs
With its fifth-generation, high-performance architecture, the SilkWorm 48000 is a reliable foundation for core-to-edge SANs, enabling fabrics capable of supporting thousands of hosts and storage devices. To provide even higher performance, enhanced Brocade ISL Trunking combines up to eight 4 Gbit/sec ports between switches into a single, logical high-speed trunk running at up to 32 Gbit/sec.

Ideal for Enterprise Applications
The SilkWorm 48000 is designed to integrate with heterogeneous environments that include IBM mainframe and open platforms with multiple operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and i5/OS. These capabilities help make it ideal for enterprise management and high-volume transaction processing applications such as:
ERP
Data warehousing
Data backup
Remote mirroring
High-availability clustering

A Cost-effective Platform for High-performance SAN Extension
Designed for use in the Brocade SilkWorm 48000 Director, the SilkWorm 48000 Director Blade FR4-18i is the industry's first 4 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel enterprise-class routing blade, providing routing services and performance-optimized FCIP. The SilkWorm FR4-18i offers a wide range of benefits for inter-SAN connectivity, including long-distance SAN extension, greater resource sharing, and simplified management.

Ideal for Enterprise Applications
The SilkWorm 48000 also supports the SilkWorm FC4-16IP iSCSI blade module, which enables cost-effective, easy-to-manage Ethernet connectivity so low-cost servers can access high-performance Fibre Channel storage resources.