IBM Brocade User Manual

Introduction 9
Features, specifications, and standards
1
FCoE features
The Brocade 2-Port 10GbE Converged Network Adaptersupport the following Fibre Channel over
Ethernet (FCoE) features:
• 500,000 IOPS per port for maximum IO transfer rates.
• 10 Gbps throughput per port full duplex
• Target rate limiting. You can enable or disable this feature on specific ports. Target Rate
Limiting relies on the storage driver to determine the speed capability of a discovered remote
ports, then uses this information to throttle FCP traffic rate to slow-draining targets. This
reduces or eliminates network congestion and alleviates I/O slowdowns at faster targets.
Target rate limiting is enforced on all targets that are operating at a speed lower than that of
the target with the highest speed. If the driver is unable to determine a remote port’s speed, 1
Gbps is assumed. Target Rate Limiting protects only FCP write traffic.
• N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV). This allows multiple N_Ports to share a single physical N_Port.
This allows multiple Fibre Channel initiators to occupy a single physical port and reduce SAN
hardware requirements.
• Boot over SAN. This feature provides the ability to boot the host operating system from a boot
device located somewhere on the SAN instead of the host’s local disk or direct attached
storage. Specifically, this “boot device” is a logical unit number (LUN) located on a storage
device.
• Fabric-based boot LUN discovery, a feature that allows the host to obtain boot LUN information
from the fabric zone database. Fabric OS 6.2 is required on adjacent switches to support this
feature.
• Persistent binding. This enables you to permanently assign a system SCSI target ID to a
specific Fibre Channel device.
• Fibre Channel-Security Protocol (FC-SP) providing device authentication through key
management.
• FCoE Initialization Protocol (FIP) support for the following:
- FIP 2.0
- preFIP and FIP 1.03
- FIP Discovery protocol for dynamic FCF discovery and FCoE link management.
- FPMA FIP fabric login.
- FIP VLAN discovery.
- FIP discovery solicitation and FCP discovery.
- Login (FIP and FCoE).
- FIP link down handling.
- FIP version compatibility.
- FIP keep alive
- FIP clear virtual links
NOTE
The Brocade 2-Port 10GbE Converged Network Adapter FIP logic automatically adapts to the
adequate FIP version and preFIP to enable backward compatibility.

IBM Brocade Specifications

General

Brand	IBM
Model	Brocade
Category	Adapter
Language	English