INSPEED™ SAN STORAGE SWITCH MODEL 355 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
USER’S GUIDE
2
FEATURES
The InSpeed™ SAN Storage Switch Model 355 has the following features:
• High Performance Fibre Channel Switching:
• Wire speed non-blocking Crossbar switch core
• Single 12-port InSpeed SOC 320 ASIC with embedded SERDES
• Multiple simultaneous conversations between ports
• Traffic routed directly to destination ports
• 2 Gb/s or 1 Gb/s performance across all ports
• Aggregate bandwidth of 48 Gb/s
• Supports cascades up to 3 switches and up to 126 host and storage devices
• No complex fabric services or buffers
• Effortlessly connects to any vendor’s fabric
• Patent-pending technology:
• Fairness and Prioritization–ensures devices all have guaranteed access, or explicitly
have prioritized access, over all other devices in a system.
• Stealth
TM
Intelligent Change Manager–delivers maximum stability through automatic
elimination of state and change notification system disruptions and unprecedented
control of disruptive events.
• Automatic Trunking–enables fully-multiplied throughput and bandwidth, failover pathing,
and dynamic load balancing and device prioritization.
• Advanced diagnostics, performance monitoring, and fault isolation including continuous switch
and port monitoring and automatic bypass of problematic or unused ports.
• Port Smart Settings, which are predefined port-level configurations that optimize switch
performance and stability.
• One-Step Zoning, including overlapping/non-overlapping zones with port or AL_PA-based
zoning.
• Switch management using the embedded http-based web server, Command Line Interface
(CLI), or Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).
• Half-rack, 1U size for easy installation (optional 19" rack-mounting kits available).
• Fibre Channel ANSI Standards Compliance
INSPEED™ TECHNOLOGY
InSpeed™ technology is an advanced switching architecture that couples a non-blocking crossbar
switch with a unique switch port logic and per-port SERDES. This results in the industry’s highest
density Fibre Channel switch on a chip (SOC). The port logic is based on Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop
(FC-AL), an ANSI standard (X3T11) designed to provide shared bandwidth over low-cost media.
This architecture enables the switch’s router to send data directly from one port to another, allowing for
multiple, simultaneous conversations between ports—effectively multiplying bandwidth. InSpeed™
provides the same performance as complex fabric switches that support FC-SW2. InSpeed™ can even
exceed fabric switch performance in entry-level SAN environments, where the overhead associated with
longer name addressing and services is not beneficial.