Dell Brocade Adapters - Manual (Page 57)

Brocade Adapters Installation and Reference Manual 29
53-1002144-01
Adapter features
1
- Interrupt time delay. There is a time delay during which the host generates interrupts. You
can increase this delay time and thereby coalesce multiple interrupts events into one. This
results in fewer interrupts for interrupt events.
- Interrupt latency timer. An interrupt is generated when no new reply message requests
occur after a specific time period. You can adjust this time period and thereby minimize
I/O latency.
• 16 Virtual Channels (VCs) per port. VC-RDY flow control can use these multiple channels for
Quality of Service (QoS) and traffic prioritization in physical and virtualized network
environments.
• Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S)
Specification supporting the CIM Provider, which allows any standard Common Information
Model (CIM) and SMI-S based management software to manage installed Brocade adapters.
NOTE
Although SMI-S Provider and CIM Provider may be used interchangeably, CIM Provider is the
more generic term, while SMI-S is storage-specific.
• 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. You can change default speed using BCU commands. Target Rate Limiting
protects only FCP write traffic.
• N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV).
Allows multiple N_Ports to share a single physical N_Port. Multiple Fibre Channel initiators can
share this single physical port and reduce SAN hardware requirements.
• N_Port Trunking works in conjunction with the Fibre Channel trunking feature on Brocade
switches, whereby the Fabric Operating System (OS) provides a mechanism to trunk two switch
ports of the same port group into one link. When trunking is enabled, two physical ports
belonging to the same Brocade dual-port adapter are trunked together to form a single pipe.
This provides advantages such as the following:
- Simplified management - for example, zoning and VM setup only require one WWN instead
of two if using two different ports.
- More VMs can be deployed on a single server.
- Higher throughput for such applications as video streaming.
- Single failures within a port group are completely transparent to upper level applications.
The following licenses must be installed on the switch connected to the HBA port or Fabric
Adapter port configured in HBA mode. Note that this is in line with the licenses required on the
switch for QoS to work with the adapter.
- Server Application Optimization (SAO) license
- Trunking license