In a previous post we talked about the death of QLogic switches. At the time, there was not a cost competitive replacement for those little switches. Additionally, a year ago when that was posted, there was still a whole year of hardware warranty left on the switches. Neither of those are the case now.
Unless you previously bought a very long service contract with QLogic, your warranty ends December 31, 2017. That is the official end of support for those switches. That means they need to be replaced before that period in time, as the switches are vital to the function of your environment. Luckily, Mirazon’s preferred fibre channel vendor, Brocade, has a new switch out that is a perfect replacement, the G610.
The G610 is, as you may have guessed, the baby brother to the G620. We covered the G620 in the previous post. It’s an amazing switch, but if you only need six to 12 ports, it’s overkill on both abilities and expense. The new G610 however, starts with only eight ports licensed, and grows in eight port increments. It’s still a 32 Gbit switch, so if you truly need that kind of speed on a small port count, you’re set. More likely, eight and 16 Gbit customers will go with it just as an affordable small switch. Street price for these switches is starting around $4,000, which is much cheaper than previous switches that were available.
In addition to all of that, the G610 is ready for NVMe over FC, a standard that will be adopted in the next few years by many storage vendors for low latency, highly transactional, high speed storage connectivity. Here’s an updated switch comparison chart with the new niche filled in:
| Switch | Maximum Speed of ports (FC) | Maximum Number of ports | Uplink Ports | Speed and number of base ports | License Upgrades |
| QLogic 3810 | 8 Gbit | 8 | None | 8x 8 Gbit | None |
| QLogic 5802v | 8 Gbit | 20 | 4x 20 Gbit | 8x 8 Gbit | 4 port increments |
| Brocade 6505 | 16 Gbit | 24 | None | 12x 16 Gbit | 12 port increments |
| Brocade 6510 | 16 Gbit | 48 | None | 24x 16 Gbit | 12 port increments |
| Brocade 6520 | 16 Gbit | 96 | None | 48x 16 Gbit | 12 port increments |
| Brocade G610 | 32 Gbit | 24 | None | 8x 32 Gbit | 8 port increments |
| Brocade G620 | 32 Gbit | 64* | 4x 128 Gbit | 24x 16 Gbit | 12/16 port increments** |
| Cisco MDS 9148S | 16 Gbit | 48 | None | 12x 16 Gbit | 12 port increments |
| Cisco MDS 9250i | 16 Gbit | 40x 16 Gbit8x it FCoE 2x 10 Gbe |
2x 10gbe for FCIP 8x FCoE |
12x 16 Gbit FC8x 10 Gbit FCoE2x 10 Gbe | 20x FC |
| Cisco MDS 9396S | 16 Gbit | 96 | None | 48x 16 Gbit | 12 port increments |
*Assuming that the uplink ports use fanout cables to provide more 32 Gbit ports.
**12 ports until the last block, which is 16.