difference between a regular san switch and director

[ionic_tease]

What is the difference between a san switch like Brocade SilkWork 2100 and a HP SAN Director 64?

[Richard Tengdin]

The Brocade 2100 was a single Arbitrated Loop switch with 8 ports. The SAN Director 64 was a McData unit so it was from a different vendor. Both were 1 Gbps devices.

In general, switches are single units with embedded management and have a fixed number of ports, no blades. The new Cisco 9216 is an exception to this rule, however.

Director-class switches are much larger and a blade-based architecture. They also have dual (redundant) supervisor modules so everything in the enclosure is redundant.

Now that we have 64-port switches the break point for director class systems is 128 ports and above.

[Bill Costigan]

The term Director is (IMHO) a marketing term.
Generally it means a switch with high avalability features such as redundent components and the ability to do hardware and software updates without having to take the device down. Typically, director class switches can support a high number of ports.

As far as the end devices (hosts and disk arrays) are concerned there is no difference.

[ionic_tease]

To upgrade the speed from 1gb to 2gb would that involve swapping out the 4-port cards?

[Richard Tengdin]

I strongly doubt you will be able to do a blade upgrade for at least two reasons: 1 Gpbs *and* 2 Gpbs products are obsolete and McData merged with Brocade.....

Contact your HP reseller and have them talk to their Brocade rep. You can probably get a rebate for replacing your 1 Gbps McData director with a new 4 Gpbs Brodcade director.