2Brocade Adapters Administrator’s Guide
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Enhanced Ethernet features
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Drivers

Three types of adapter drivers are provided in installation packages:
•Storage driver - This is a unified driver that provides Fibre Channel frame transport for Brocade
HBAs and FCoE transport for Brocade CNAs. The adapter logic detects either a FCoE or Fibre
Channel network and the appropriate driver support is provided automatically.
NOTE
The unified storage driver will claim all installed Brocade Fiber Channel HBAs, as well as FCoE
CNAs installed in a system. This driver will be used instead of the driver originally installed for
the HBA.
•Network driver - This is the driver for frame transport over Ethernet and basic Ethernet
services. This driver only applies to CNAs.
•Intermediate driver - This is for Windows systems only. It provides support for multiple VLANs.
This driver only applies to CNAs.
The firmware is packaged with both the Storage driver and the Network driver so that it can be
downloaded by either of the drivers. The firmware is also stored in the flash for SAN boot.
For more information about the driver packages, support for the drivers, and driver installation,
refer to the Brocade Adapters Installation and Reference Manual.
Enhanced Ethernet features
Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) and priority-based flow control are the two basic
requirments in a lossless Ethernet environment. These capabilities allow the Fibre Channel frames
to run directly over 10 Gbps Ethernet segments without adversely affecting performance.

Enhanced transmission selection

With ETS, more important storage data traffic can be assigned higher priority and higher
guaranteed bandwidth so that it is not stalled by less important traffic. To enable effective
utilization of the network, ETS allows lower priority to unused bandwidth from high-priority queues
ETS allows configuration of bandwidth per priority group.
Priority group ID usage is defined as follows:
•PGID = {0, 7} is used when the priority group is limited for its bandwidth use.
•PGID = {8, 14} is reserved.
•PGID = {15} is used for priorities that are not limited for their bandwidth use.
The configured priority group percentage refers to the maximum percentage of available link
bandwidth after PGID 15 is serviced, assuming all priority groups are fully subscribed. If one of the
priority groups does not consume its allocated bandwidth, then any unused portion is available for
use by other priority groups.