November 15, 2000 11:12 INRANGE Smashes SAN Distance Limitation With New
Technology in FC/9000 Fibre Channel Director
Any-to-Any 100 Kilometer Distance Capability for Enterprise SANs Now Supported
MOUNT LAUREL, N.J., Nov. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Today's enterprise storage area networks (SANs) must
provide instant, global access to data distributed across multiple sites and over significant distances.
Traditionally, 10 kilometers has been the distance limitation between devices in a SAN. To overcome this
limitation, INRANGE Technologies (Nasdaq: INRG), a leading developer of scalable infrastructure solutions
for SANs, announced today that its enterprise-class IN-VSN(TM) FC/9000 Fibre Channel Director has been
upgraded with new technology (XCAF) to allow any port in a SAN to communicate over 100 kilometers,
without performance degradation.
INRANGE is demonstrating its "virtual SAN" capabilities at the Comdex/Fall Conference (November 13-17,
Las Vegas), exhibiting as part of the Fibre Channel Industry Association's pavilion. The 64-port FC/9000 is
currently the highest capacity fibre channel director available. With this announcement, each of its 64 ports
can support SAN devices over 100-kilometer distances while maintaining full utilization of bandwidth. In
addition, the company has issued a Statement of Direction that will increase the maximum capacity of the
FC/9000 to 128 ports. With that upgrade, all 128 ports would also have the extended distance capability.
Carl Greiner, Vice President-Director of META Group, commented on the evolving role of director-class
platforms within storage networks. "Directors are becoming backbones, and must have mega-bandwidth
capability between SANs, across the extended campus or MAN," said Greiner. "Until now, users have been
limited to only a few ports that could go long distances without severe performance drop-off. XCAF in
conjunction with the FC/9000 allows any-to-any port configurations between directors and more effectively
addresses the bandwidth issues."
"Since every port on the FC/9000 can simultaneously support 100 kilometers, users will no longer be forced
to make tradeoffs such as limiting the number of extended ports," said INRANGE Executive Vice President
of Marketing Charles Foley. "This is key for the emerging backbone model of SANs, and makes the
FC/9000 the logical choice for today's SSP and ASP metro model connecting remote devices into a
single-managed SAN."
With the explosive growth in SANs, a key imperative is to implement solutions that work not only today, but
also in coming years. Business dynamics and today's growth in enterprises indicate that users and systems
will not always remain in the same location within the campus/metro environment. "Our new
distance-shattering technology will make the most efficient use of SANs as businesses grow," said Foley.
"One of today's greatest SAN challenges is managing the connectivity and growth of geographically
distributed SANs," said Robin Purohit, senior director of product management for SAN, Clustering and
Replication, VERITAS Software. "Technologies like INRANGE's new FC/9000 provides the connectivity for
IT professionals to increase global data availability and enhance system performance."
The XCAF 100-kilometer technology for the FC/9000 is scheduled for December, 2000 availability. It will
be available through the company's direct sales force, as well as through its alternate channels of resellers
and OEMs. |
