Brocade Access Gateway Administrator's Guide - Supporting Fabric OS v5.3.0 (53-1000633-01, June 2007)

2 Access Gateway Administrator’s Guide
53-1000633-01
Overview of Brocade Access Gateway
1
Figure 1 compares a configuration that connects eight hosts to the fabric using Brocade Access
Gateway to the same configuration with standard fabric switches.
FIGURE 1 Access Gateway and fabric switch comparison
The difference between the fabric switch (Fabric OS native mode) and Brocade Access Gateway is
as follows:
• The Fabric OS switch is a part of the fabric; it requires two to four times as many physical ports,
consumes fabric resources, and can connect to a Brocade-based fabric only.
• Brocade Access Gateway is outside the fabric; it reduces the number of switches in the fabric
and the number of required physical ports. You can connect Brocade Access Gateway to either
a Brocade-, Brocade EOS-, or Cisco-based fabric.
BROCADE FEATURES IN ACCESS GATEWAY MODE
When using a Brocade switch in Access Gateway mode, most features are no longer applicable.
These features include Admin Domains, Advanced Performance Monitoring, direct connection to
SAN target devices, Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop support, Fabric Manager, FICON, IP over FC, ISL
trunking, extended fabrics, management platform services, name services (SNS), port mirroring,
Secure Fabric OS, SMI-S, and zoning. These switch features are available in the default switch
mode of operation.
Access Gateway does not support any Secure Fabric OS features. All the security enforcement is
done in the enterprise fabric. DCC policy in the enterprise fabric should include N_Port WWN and
port WWNs of all F_Ports on Access Gateway mapped to that N_Port. In case of DCC policy
violation, the port in the enterprise fabric to which N_Port is connected will be disabled. This will
bring down the corresponding N_Port and F_Ports mapped to it on Access Gateway.