Brocade Access Gateway Administrator's Guide (53-1000605-01, October 2007)

Access Gateway Administrator’s Guide 1

53-1000605-01

Chapter

Introduction to the Brocade Access Gateway

This chapter describes the functions of Brocade Access Gateway. The Brocade 200E switch and

the Brocade 4012, 4016, 4018, 4020, and 4024 embedded switches running Fabric OS 6.0.0 or

higher support Access Gateway (AG).

In this chapter

•Overview of Brocade Access Gateway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

•Access Gateway port types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

•Port mapping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

•Failover and Failback policies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

•Cold Failover. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

•Port initialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

•Access Gateway policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Overview of Brocade Access Gateway

Brocade Access Gateway allows multiple host bus adapters (HBAs) to access the fabric using fewer

physical ports. Access Gateway mode transforms the 200E or an embedded switch into a device

management tool, which is compatible with different types of fabrics, including Brocade, Brocade

Enterprise OS (EOS), and Cisco-based fabrics. For more information on compatibility, refer to the

matrix in Appendix B, “Compatibility”.

When a switch is in Access Gateway mode, it is logically transparent to the host and the fabric.

Brocade Access Gateway mode allows hosts to access the fabric without increasing the number of

switches and simplifies configuration and management in a large fabric by reducing the number of

domain IDs and ports.

Brocade Access Gateway is a device management tool and provides only a subset of Fabric OS

commands. It does not consume critical fabric elements that can inhibit scalability. For example, a

fabric that uses Access Gateways to connect hosts requires fewer domain IDs.

Figure 1 compares a configuration that connects eight hosts to the fabric using Brocade Access

Gateway to the same configuration with standard fabric switches.