Brocade Access Gateway Administrator's Guide Supporting Fabric OS v7.0.0 (53-1002156-01, April 2011)
60 Access Gateway Administrator’s Guide
53-1002156-01
Adaptive Networking on Access Gateway
3
Adaptive Networking on Access Gateway
Adaptive Networking (AN) services ensure bandwidth for critical servers, virtual servers, or
applications in addition to reducing latency and minimizing congestion. Adaptive Networking in
Access Gateway works in conjunction with the Quality of Service (QoS) feature on Brocade fabrics.
Fabric OS provides a mechanism to assign traffic priority, (high, medium, or low) for a given source
and destination traffic flow. By default, all flows are marked as medium.
The following licenses must be appropriately installed:
• The Adaptive Networking (AN) license must be installed on all switches operating in Access
Gateway mode to take advantage of the QoS and Ingress Rate Limiting features.
• The Server Application Optimization (SAO) license must be installed to extend QoS features to
supported HBAs.
To determine if these licenses are installed on the connected switch, issue the Fabric OS
licenseShow command. Refer to the Fabric OS Administrator's Guide for detailed information about
QoS.
You can configure the ingress rate limiting and SID/DID traffic prioritization levels of QoS for the
following configurations:
• Supported HBA to AG to switch
• Unsupported HBA to AG to switch
• HBA (all) to Edge AG to Core AG to switch
For additional information on the QoS feature for Brocade adapters, refer to your Brocade Adapters
Administrator's Guide.
QoS: Ingress rate limiting
Ingress rate limiting restricts the speed of traffic from a particular device to the switch port. On
switches in AG mode, you must configure ingress rate limiting on F_Ports.
For more information and procedures for configuring this feature, refer to “Ingress Limiting” in the
Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide.
QoS: SID/DID traffic prioritization
SID/DID traffic prioritization allows you to categorize the traffic flow between a given host and
target as having a high or low priority; the default is medium. For example, you can assign online
transaction processing (OLTP) to a high priority and the backup traffic to a low priority.
For detailed information on this feature, refer to “QoS: SID/DID traffic prioritization” in the Fabric
OS Administrator’s Guide.
Figure 12 shows the starting point for QoS in various Brocade and non-Brocade configurations.