In the mid-2000s, Brocade was a dominant force in the Fibre Channel switch market. Their hardware—directors and switches—was physically capable, but many advanced features (like 10GbE ports, ISL trunking, or Fabric Watch) were locked behind software licenses. To unlock them, you entered a 20-character key into the CLI.

Many secondary market vendors sell refurbished Brocade switches.

) for home lab use where official licenses are no longer sold. Generating a License Key or Retrieving a Transaction Key