re McDATA, then I'll shut up...
I'll check, but I'm 99% sure that the ED5000, their 32p switch, is a smallish ESCON director refitted with firmware and some hardware for FC. The same refit could probably be made to their existing 248p ESCON director, when they're ready to do that. Now you're talking "enterprise." They do have the EB2500, which is a Brocade Silkworm. That's their "entry-level" switch.
I'm quite aware of the FC market and the move to it...it's been paying the bills for a couple of years now. My reference to ESCON was to point out that McDATA has a decade plus of switched storage networking experience. Switching FC (standard) is probably a lot easier than switching ESCON (proprietary.) Either way, it's all fiber-optic, it's all IO, and it's all 1s and 0s.
Now, can Ancor unseat an in-house development team at EMC, that knows Symmetrix backwards and forwards? Possibly, if the in-house team doesn't execute. EMC will demand the highest degree of robustness, with little regard to brand. My point, though, was to beware McDATA, if you're even thinking about counting EMC eggs. Not that anyone was... |
