Blades for Brocade’s 48000 director that feature ports running at 8GFC are shipping to the company’s OEMs customers now, and will hit the street early next year, Brocade says.

A lot of the OEMs are past qualification now, said Brocade’s senior product manager Bill Dunmire.

Brocade’s only major rival Cisco Systems has yet to say when it will ship 8GFC blades for its directors. Brocade did very well from the last transition from 2GFC to 4GFC when it also beat its rivals to market with gear supporting the new speed, and Dunmire said it expects to repeat that trick with the 8GFC jump.

But this time around there are different forces at play. Brocade benefited a lot from the 4GFC transition in the non-bladed, non-modular switch market where gear either supported 4GFC or not. 8GFC however will ship first in directors, which will be upgraded to the new speed by buying new blades. Even though Cisco does not yet support 8GFC, all of its current directors will at least take the 8GFC cards that Cisco will inevitably ship at some stage.

Brocade said that it sees two major uses for 8GFC connections — as pipes carrying heavy backup traffic and as trunk routes at the heart of storage networks, between directors

8GFC HBAs or adaptor cards for servers are slated to reach the street sometime during the first half of the year. But director-to-director or inter-switch links do not involve HBAs. Dunmire said that take-up of VMware-driven server virtualization will encourage demand for 8GFC ISLs, because virtualization is creating a need for more SAN ports to connect server into storage networks.

Replacing 4GFC ISL connections with half as many 8GFC ISL connections carrying the same volume of traffic will free up director ports that can be used to make connections to servers.

A good rule of thumb — a conservative one — is that by reducing ISL port usage by 50%, you can increase the number of VMware servers you can connect into the SAN by 25%, said Dunmire.

Server virtualization happens to be mentioned in almost every vendor’s PR script at present. It might also be expected to reduce the number of physical servers attached to a SAN by reducing the number of Windows or Linux boxes needed to host a given number of applications. Individual servers generate the same storage traffic whether they are physical or virtual entities.

But Illuminata analyst John Webster backed up Brocade’s claim that VMware is driving up demand for SAN ports.

I’ve seen an up-tick in demand for I/O being driven by VMware, he said. The same thing happened in the mainframe environment when IBM first shipped VM [virtual machine OS], and later MVS, Webster said. That’s what drove ESCON and ESCON directors, he said. While virtualization can reduce the number of physical servers attached to a network, it may also be bringing in virtualized servers and applications that were not previously connected to the SAN.

So could Brocade do as well from beating Cisco to the 8GFC punch as it did with 4GFC? It certainly could, Webster said.

Brocade declined to say whether it had any plans to offer 8GFC blades for its McData-originated Mi10K and Mi640 directors. That might suggest that the McData directors are getting the stepchild treatment. But if they are, it will not be for long. Like the 64000, those devices will be superseded by a director Brocade has promised to ship next year.