Emulex Corporation - Products - Embedded Routers & Bridges



	Product & Technologies BR-2401 BRG 436 SR-1216

Embedded Routers & Bridges

Current products consist of sophisticated chip, board-level and firmware solutions which emulate Fibre Channel (FC) devices while using low-cost SATA Hard Disk Drives. These cost-effective solutions leverage today's existing infrastructure of FC within enterprise storage applications, but allow storage OEMs to easily add support for SATA HDDs. Two classes of solutions are currently available:

Silicon Storage Routers

Silicon Storage Routers (e.g. SR-1216) are used to create a dedicated shelf (or JBOD) of emulated FC drives using SATA drives. Each SR-1216 can support up to 16 drives per shelf, and each physical SATA drive appears on the FC loop as an emulated FC device.

The following figure shows an emulated FC JBOD (two SR-1216s used with 16 SATA drives) and an FC JBOD with a RAID controller in a High Availability (HA) configuration. Having redundant SR-1216s and paths are necessary in an HA configuration where it is a requirement that no single point of failure exists.

Embedded Storage Bridges

The BR-2401 Embedded Storage Bridges are used at the single disk drive level. The BR-2401, which may be deployed as a chip- or circuit board-level solution, resides within the disk drive canister, and combined with a SATA drive, emulates a single FC drive. These single emulated FC drives can make up an entire shelf or be intermixed with other FC drives in a shelf.

The following figure shows a shelf of emulated FC drives (a BR-2401 combined with each of the 16 SATA drives), an intermixed shelf and a shelf of FC drives with a RAID controller in an HA configuration. Having redundant paths are necessary in an HA configuration where it is a requirement that no single point of failure exists.