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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe Wagner who wrote (1857)	2/25/2000 9:22:00 AM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

Thanks for checking Joe, What's Mcdata up to? Expaned line from them? A fibre alliance roll out? Any chance for ANCR participation? zdnet.com. Coming soon: packaged SANs By Sonia R. Lelii, PC Week IT managers who dread the thought of cobbling together a storage area network with products from a half-dozen vendors may soon find a one-stop solution. Fiber channel switch maker McData Corp. is broadening its reach with a new program to provide companies with pre-tested, off-the-shelf heterogeneous SANs. The Broomfield, Colo., company later this month will unveil its FabricReady Program, which tests and integrates hardware and software from more than a dozen vendors. The result will be several FabricPak SAN solutions, said McData officials. The SAN concept is gaining popularity as a way to bring more flexibility in the computer room by providing each server access to large pools of storage, rather than connecting one server to one storage array. A blessed solution? Anything that makes it easier to buy a SAN is a good thing, said Kendall Fay, director of computer services for Corporate Express, also in Broomfield. "It seems like what we are seeing is the SAN environment moving out of the customized solutions to more of a shrink-wrapped product," Fay said. "We are seeing more and more preconfigured SANs rather than testing them at customers' locations. If you buy the solutions off McData's Web site, you have assurance that it is a blessed solution with a warranty on it." McData's first product to be announced will be the FabricPak LAN-free Backup and Tape Consolidation bundle, developed in conjunction with data backup and management software developer Veritas Software Corp. The McData package is currently available, and pricing depends on configuration. Other FabricReady Paks, to be unveiled in the coming months, will be specialized for groupware, database and clustering applications, officials said. Sources familiar with McData's plans said the company also will venture into enterprise resource planning applications. Besides Veritas, other hardware and software partners currently involved in the program's integration and testing include Hitachi Data Systems, Sterling Software Corp. and JNI Corp. Next up: Partner Pavillion Web site By Spring, McData will let customers access the solutions through a password-protected Web site, called Partner Pavillion. For instance, if customers need a backup solution, they can look at a menu on the Web site, key into a certain solution, and the site will list the software and hardware ingredients that have been tested in McData's interoperability lab. "Essentially, we are taking on the pain and guesswork in trying to figure out what are all the pieces needed for an applications solution," said Jeff Vogel, vice president of marketing and system integration services at McData. McData's role as the middleman between vendors and IT managers is unique among companies its size, say analysts. "They are a relatively small company, but they are partnering with major manufacturers on the back end and major service providers on the front end," said Rob Schaffer, an analyst at Meta Group Inc., based in Stamford, Conn. "I think they can pull it off. Not to the degree they are hoping for, but I think they have a good shot," Schaffer added. "They have a sophisticated integration lab. They could be swamped, depending on how successful they are." Any help out there?