Dell Brocade 1020 Brocade Adapters Installation and Reference Manual - Page 57

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 Brocade Adapters Installation and Reference Manual 29 53-1002144-01