8Gb Enhanced Extension Blade Offered by IBM

The 8Gb Enhanced Extension Blade (#3891) from IBM Corp. includes the following features to address availability, performance, manageability, and scalability:

• Twelve FC ports supporting 1, 2, 4, or 8Gb/s link speeds
• Ten Ethernet ports supporting 1GbE link speeds, and up to two optional 10GbE ports, both capable running IPSec
• FC routing combined with SAN distance extension FCIP capability
• Long-wave SFP transceivers designed to support connectivity at distances up to 4-10km
• Extended long distance SFP transceiver designed to support connectivity at distances up to 25km
• Copper SFP and 4Gb optical transceivers designed to be used with IP ports on the 8Gb Enhanced Extension Blade

The Inter-Chassis License with 16x (4×16 Gbps) QSFP 100 m (#7874) feature includes the same functionality as feature #7871, but with 16Gb QSFP transceivers to provide connectivity up to 100 meters.

FC and FCIP technology enables the 8Gb Extension Blade to become a flexible and extensible platform to move data. Whether configured for simple point-to-point or multi-site SAN extension, the 8Gb Enhanced Extension Blade addresses BC, data retention, and global data access requirements, and is now capable of running IP Security (IPSec) on both 10GbE interfaces.

The 8Gb Enhanced Extension Blade (#3891) is a scalable and flexible platform combining FC and advanced FCIP technology for building or expanding a high-performance SAN extension infrastructure for DR, data protection, and data mobility storage solutions to move more data faster and further. Customers who want their connections encrypted can use both 10Gb interfaces running IPSec, doubling encrypted throughput for each blade.

The 8Gb Enhanced Extension Blade is for open systems and mainframe disk and tape extension, multi-site synchronous and asynchronous disk replication, centralized SAN backup, recovery, and archiving, global data and storage resource migration, distribution, and sharing.

Optical Inter-Chassis License (ICL) feature on the 16Gb fabric backbones now supports quad small form-factor pluggable (QSFP) transceivers providing connectivity up to 100 meters.

Key prerequisites
The switch family supports FC connectivity for servers and storage. New features announced here support all features and functions as indicated and require Fabric OS level 7.1.0, and later.

Planned availability date: May 24, 2013