Brocade Communications Systems has announced that it has increased the port count on the blades used in its Fibre Channel backbone switch by 33 percent and doubled the throughput on those ports from 4Gbps to 8Gbps.
The storage networking vendor said it has increased the number of ports per blade for its flagship DCX backbone switch and its midsize DCX-4S backbone switch.
The DCX is a 14U (24.5-in) high switch with eight vertical blade slots. Brocade said it has increased the number of Fibre Channel ports on each blade from 48 to 64, meaning the DCX can now have up to 512 ports. Built for midsize networks, the 8U-high Brocade DCX-4S has four horizontal blade slots. The total port count in that switch grows from 192 to 256.
Brocade customers will be able to upgrade their existing DCX switches by simply pulling an existing 4Gbps Fibre Channel blade and inserting a new 8Gbps blade.