Designed To The Core For Open Systems

Changing business requirements at many of today’s best companies are driving the need for the scalability, resiliency, and manageability provided by modular chassis-based SAN switches. As new and unpredictable demands spring up every quarter, these companies require the flexibility to modify and expand their server/storage infrastructure frequently without impacting production environments. In addition, as the mission-critical role of data continues to grow, more businesses than ever must guarantee iron-clad security while providing a high degree of control and monitoring.

Until now, the robust performance, rapid deployment potential, and “pay as you grow” budgeting advantages of Fibre Channel chassis switches have been available only in the form of expensive Director appliances targeted primarily at mainframe customers. IT managers with high-port-count open systems SANs who are unwilling to pay a premium for unused Director features (such as FICON support) have been forced to purchase complicated meshes of smaller switches, or very large fixed-port units both of which offer high port counts, but much less flexibility, fault tolerance, and overall system control.

QLogic now provides a new class of core switch, representing a sane alternative to quarter-million dollar Directors and large, less resilient fixed-port switches. The QLogic 9000 is Designed to the Core for cost-sensitive, business-critical, open-system environments that require high port and performance, with support for 99.999% available solutions.

Designed To The Core For Open Systems

Data center managers in mainframe environments are responsible for connecting large numbers of servers and storage systems. They pay a premium for servers, storage, and Director switches that support proprietary mainframe protocols.

Data center managers in open systems environments also want high availability, high performance, and scalability. However, they expect products built on open standards to be substantially more cost effective: less complex, more flexible, and easier to use.

Reliable, fast, modular, and incredibly cost effective, the QLogic SANbox line of Core-to-Edge fabric switch modules and intelligent storage router modules are Designed to the Core for the open enterprise.

SANbox Product Family

The SANbox 9000 is the flagship in the SANbox line of fabric switches and intelligent storage router platforms. As individual components, every QLogic SANbox part delivers the advantages of a best-in-class, standalone product solution. Working together as an intelligent, integrated network solution under the Enterprise Fabric Suite (EFS) software umbrella, they are easy to deploy and administrator. EFS makes your SAN perform better, too. That’s why the entire QLogic SANbox line won the Windows IT Pro Readers Choice award. For your switched Fibre Channel fabric, you can count on QLogic for exactly the right switch…from the core, to the distribution layer, to the edge. For low-cost local and remote server IP network connectivity, QLogic iSRs boost utilization while driving down cost and complexity. Most importantly, you ensure an open environment that can transparently accommodate multiple vendors, new solutions, and future flexibility.

SANbox 9000 Product Overview

HyperStack Architecture – The SANbox 9000 Series stackable chassis switch is a new class of core switch that enables solutions with the 99.999 percent availability, blazing performance, and easy scalability of a Director but without the large footprint and high TCO.

What makes it all possible is the SANbox 9000 architecture that features:

• HyperStack: Four 200Gb dedicated backplane-to-backplane interconnects between chassis modules
• High Bandwidth Chassis: 1.6Tb of backplane bandwidth for a dual chassis HyperStack configuration
• Redundancy: Redundant CPU, power supply, and fan blades, including the ability to hot-swap replace by a customer
• Compact: Up to 128 ports in only 4U of rack space, 256 ports in 8U-HyperStack
• Ultra-High Availability: Optional fault tolerant transparent CPU failover feature for any SB9200 module

Stackable Chassis Switch

For unprecedented scalability, the eight-slot SANbox 9000 chassis is uniquely modular in two dimensions. Like a Director switch, I/O Blades can be added as needed. Unlike a Director, the SANbox 9000 chassis is itself a module. Using HyperStack technology pioneered by QLogic, a second chassis can be inter-connected when needed and managed as a single switch.

For high availability, the SANbox 9000 features redundant, hot swap CRUs, including CPU, power supply, and fan blades. For ultra-high availability, any SANbox 9200 dual-CPU module can optionally include the fault tolerant transparent CPU failover feature.

I/O Blades

4Gb FC I/O Blade 16 Ports x 4Gb Fibre Channel. The 4Gb FC Blade includes sixteen 4Gb/2Gb/1Gb auto-sensing Fibre Channel ports. Mix and match any combination of blades for up to 128 ports per chassis module or 256 ports in a dual-chassis HyperStack.

8Gb FC I/O Blade 16 Ports x 8Gb Fibre Channel. The 8Gb FC Blade includes sixteen 8Gb/4Gb/2Gb auto-sensing Fibre Channel ports. Mix and match any combination of blades for up to 128 ports per chassis module or 256 ports in a dual-chassis HyperStack.

10Gb FC I/O Blade 4 Ports x 10Gb Fibre Channel. The 10Gb FC Blade includes four 10Gb Fibre Channel ports. Configure SANbox 9000 slots with 10Gb FC Blades for high-speed ISL connectivity from the core to the distribution, or edge tiers with SANbox 5000 stackable switches.

iSCSI and FCIP I/O Modules 2 Ports x 1Gb Ethernet + 2 Ports x 2Gb Fibre Channel. QLogic has chosen not to sacrifice valuable high-density FC I/O Blade slots for IP support. Instead, external half-wide 1U SANbox 6000 series iSR modules are utilized for low-density/low-cost iSCSI and FCIP ports. Even at 4 + 1 = 5U, the SANbox 9000 Director switch is still the most rack efficient and rack-mount flexible multi-protocol solution in the industry.

Fabric Management Software

With wizard-based installation and configuration tools, the SANbox 9000 stackable chassis switch is the easiest to install and easiest to manage core switch on the planet. But for large fabrics where management becomes complicated, the SANbox 9000 series includes a comprehensive and powerful suite of management tools.

For point-and-click management, the tools are accessible from a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI). And for the SAN experts, a comprehensive Command Line Interface (CLI) is available. Plus, integration with your favorite third-party applications is made easy with QLogic SANbox APIs, or the industry-compliant SMI-S agent.

QuickTools is an embedded Java web applet for device discovery, device management, zoning, and fabric management. A configuration wizard walks users through switch setup and configuration. A zoning wizard provides simple drag-and-drop zoning with fast activation to get the switch ready for immediate use.

Enterprise Fabric Suite 2007 is a suite of tools for setup, configuration, zoning, fabric management, fabric monitoring, performance monitoring, and configuring extended distance capability. Enterprise Fabric Suite 2007 can manage an unlimited number of switches and fabrics from a single console.

Adaptive Trunking guarantees extremely high performance while eliminating the need to manually configure and maintain ISL aggregation groups. Effective ISL routing and utilization is essential to achieving Return on Investment (ROI) in mid- to large-scale SANs. QLogic’s Adaptive Trunking comes standard with all SANbox 9000 series switches.

Fabric Security offers the right mix of protection features for user security, connection security, and device security. RADIUS authentication is supported so that separate user names and passwords don’t have to be managed. The data path for switch management communication is encrypted using Secure SHell (SSH) for CLI and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) for Enterprise Fabric Suite 2007, QuickTools, and SMI-S. Users can setup device connection security to control what devices have access to the switch. ISL and port authentication is achieved using Fibre Channel-Security Protocol (FC-SP) and DH-CHAP. Additional device authentication is performed using FC-GS-4 CT.

SANdoctor™ provides a comprehensive set of diagnostic tools for troubleshooting fabric problems. FC Ping verifies that a functional path exists between two ports. FC Trace Route displays path information between a source and a destination. Digital Diagnostics Monitoring displays SFP, X2, and XPAK transceiver data to determine if variables are within operational limits.