Brocade Communications Systems Brocade Backbone DCX 8510-4 - Manual (Page 29)

Brocade DCX 8510-4 Backbone Hardware Reference Manual 9
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Serviceability
1
Serviceability
The Brocade DCX 8510-4 provides the following features to enhance and ensure serviceability:
• Modular design with hot-swappable components.
• Flash memory that stores two firmware images per control processor.
• USB port on control processor blades for most tasks that formerly required an FTP/SCP server,
including software and firmware upgrades.
• Nonvolatile random-access memory (NVRAM), containing the OEM serial number, Brocade
serial number, revision information, and part number information.
• Background health-check daemon.
• Memory scrubber, self test, and bus ping to determine if a bus is not functioning.
• RASlog messages.
• SMI-S compliant.
• Hardware and software watchdog timers.
• Status LEDs.
• Predictive diagnostics analysis through Fabric Watch.
• SNMP (including version 3) integration with higher-layer managers.
• Cable management using vertical finger assemblies to accommodate the horizontal
orientation of the blades.
Software features
The Fabric OS allows any Fibre Channel-compliant device to attach to the switches as long as it
conforms to the device login, name service, and related Fibre Channel standards. Each operating
environment requires that a Fibre Channel host bus adapter (HBA) be available with a
standards-compliant driver for correct interface to the fabric.
Fabric OS consists of a set of embedded applications running on top of an embedded Linux
operating system kernel. Some of these applications include:
• Name server
• Alias server
• Zone server
• Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agent
• SMI-S compliant API
• Syslog auditing
• RCS (Reliable Commit Service)
• NTP
• Tasks to manage address assignment, routing, link initialization, fabric initialization, link
shutdown, Brocade DCX 8510-4 shutdown, and the user interface