Brocade CNA's

[NetWise]

Anyone have any experience with Brocade 1020 CNA's? I've found some sources for picking them up as cheap as $90 each, which seems pretty good for a 2 port 10GbE capable NIC. Best I can tell it looks like they require an _active_ SFP+ TwinAx cable to be inexpensive, likely Brocade branded for better support. I'm told that in general CNA's that do 10GbE/FCoE can work without issue as 'just' a 10GbE Ethernet NIC, which is all I want. My internal resources at Dell suggest that a PowerConnect 8024F might be the most inexpensive way to go if I can find one off-lease for low cost.

But I figured I'd ask here, as this seems to be the place for home-labbers and those trying to get good things done on the cheap, where possible.

Thanks in advance,

Avram

 

[Skud]

I have two of these in production. One is in my ZFS server and the other in a Hyper-V box. Both are connected via a 3m Brocade active SPF+ cable P/N: 58-10000027-01.

They work well, but the issue I had was with finding drivers. When I first installed them I was running OpenIndiana directly on the ZFS box and Brocade had yet to release Solaris 11 drivers. I wanted to try FreeNAS 8 or even ZFS on FreeBSD9.0, but Brocade doesn't support BSD at all. I have yet to come across an OS with built-in drivers for these, so make sure the OS you want to run has drivers available on Brocade's site.

I ended up installing ESXi 5.0 (which Brocade does have drivers for) and running OpenIndiana as a guest with the vmxnet3 driver and the HBAs in passthrough. It's been stable and I don't have any complaints.

They are good cards and I can see up to 500MB/s - 600MB/s of throughput via iSCSI between my ZFS server and the Hyper-V host. CPU usage seems low, but I don't really keep track of it.

Ninja Edit: One other thing. They seem to be pretty "Brocade centric" in that there are very few non-Brocade devices these will connect with. Unless you want to connect them to each other then make sure you have a Brocade switch, cables, etc. Though, I think I have seen some posts on Brocade's site regarding connecting to a Cisco Nexus and possibly an HP switch.

Thanks!!
Riley

 

[NetWise]

Good to know, okay so this should work As mentioned, I have a pretty good resource at Dell, and he said with the later firmware on the 8024F (which I've worked with, with Intel X520-DA2's and EQL's), they work just fine, he has sold a number of them in combination. So now I just need to find a switch. I'm not expecting they're going to be very happy with the 10GbE SFP+ modules in my PowerConnect 6248's.