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

2 Access Gateway Administrator’s Guide
53-1000605-01
Overview of Brocade Access Gateway
1
FIGURE 1 Access Gateway and fabric switch comparison
The differences between the fabric switch (Fabric OS native mode) and Brocade Access Gateway
are 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When using a Brocade switch in Access Gateway mode, most features are no longer applicable.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,
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. The DCC policy in the enterprise fabric should include the N_Port
WWN and the port WWNs of all the HBAs connected to the F_Ports on Access Gateway that are
mapped to that N_Port. In case of a DCC policy violation, the port in the enterprise fabric to which
the F_Ports are connected and the N_Port is mapped to it on Access Gateway are disabled.