interoperability between cisco and brocade switch

[kunjuttan]

I am having a brocade silkworm 16 port switch and one cisco MDS 9000 switch. I want to know the possiblity of ISL between these two switches.

Please suggest.

[Sheldon Smith]

Don't know myself, but the May 2012 SAN Design Guide states "An interoperable, heterogeneous switch fabric can contain different series of switches." For a combination of C-series and B-series, Go to http://www.hp.com/go/SDGManuals, see "Fabric Interoperability: Merging Fabrics Based on C-series and B-series Fibre Channel Switches Application Notes"

[tbone654]

It is possible... but I would do everthing I could to just move the connections from the brocade to the cisco...  Even if you don't have the ports availabe, it's a better choice to add line-cards and sfp's, etc. than going to interop mode...  You dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator...

Move them to the CISCO at all costs... IMO...

If you have a blade rack with an onboard Brocade switch and your connecting to CISCO MDS, change out the blade switch to CISCO, possibly one side at a time...  Or consider moving toward CNA's (converged network adapters) which is the future anyway...

Here's a link...  note: I have CISCO partner access, so it may not be availabe to everyone, then just google CNA CISCO i guess...

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/prod/collateral/ps10265/ps10493/data_sheet_c78-623738.html