INRANGE Announces 128-Port FC/9000 Fibre Channel Director
/FROM PR NEWSWIRE PHILADELPHIA 800-523-4424/
TO BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY EDITORS:
INRANGE Announces 128-Port FC/9000 Fibre Channel Director
Extends Leadership Position in Enterprise Storage Networking
With Industry's Most Scalable, Highest Performance SAN Switching Technology
LUMBERTON, N.J., March 22 /PRNewswire/ --
INRANGE Technologies (Nasdaq: INRG), a leader in scalable networking
solutions, today announced general availability of the 128-port model of its
IN-VSN(TM) FC/9000(TM) Fibre Channel Director, the industry's most scalable
technology for building Storage Area Networks (SANs). The new FC/9000-128
supports at least twice the capacity of its closest competitor, and offers
users the highest-performance switching infrastructure on which to centrally
manage and add storage resources, without interruption to business.
Storage Area Networks (SANs) are gaining wide acceptance in the enterprise
marketplace, offering an effective way to manage the increasing volumes of
information generated by today's electronic business initiatives. In recent
analyst surveys, the ability to easily manage the explosive growth of these
storage networks is the number-one concern for corporate users. It is this
requirement that the large-scale FC/9000 directors specifically address.
INRANGE introduced the industry's first 64-port fibre channel director in
early 2000, in response to this emerging market need for users to build SANs
that could expand easily and maintain performance levels as ports were added,
that were simpler to manage than weaving together a mesh of smaller switches,
and that offered bullet-proof levels of redundancy to protect businesses with
no tolerance for downtime. "The key letters in Storage Networking are R-O-I,"
noted INRANGE President and CEO Greg Grodhaus. "This comes from reduced
management cost, non-disruptive growth strategies, and full,
non-decreasing-throughput storage networks that are always on, always
available. Director-based solutions are best suited to deliver that, enabling
existing levels of IT staffing to manage exponentially growing storage
resources most efficiently."
FC/9000 technology has established great traction and driven rapid growth
of INRANGE's Open Storage Networking line of business, which is expected to
grow on the order of 175% in 2001, following 179% growth in 2000. "The
FC/9000 is fast becoming the large-scale backbone of choice for all systems
and servers," stated Grodhaus. "More than 98% of the traffic directed by our
FC/9000 technology is for Unix, NT, Linux, and other open systems platforms.
We have no server or storage platform bias or limitations in managing
networks. Our customers want us to connect to, and manage traffic to,
whatever is `at the other end.' Large-scale applications and storage requires
large-scale switching solutions. INRANGE provides much more than the
technology. We supply the knowledge and resources directly, and on behalf of
our business partners such as QLogic, IBM and HDS, we help our customers use
technology tailored to their unique environments and specific applications to
solve their complex business problems."
Recently, companies such as OnMoney.com, Austrian Railways, and Eclipsys
have all selected FC/9000 directors to serve as their "core" SAN
infrastructure, citing the benefits of being able to install a solution that
permits large-scale storage consolidation while permitting full throughput
between all devices on the network, even as they grow. Last month, Storage
Access -- an emerging Storage Service Provider -- announced that it
standardized on INRANGE storage networking technology for installation at
their points of service because of the FC/9000's fault-tolerant design and
unmatched capability to enable server/storage access without restriction,
across multi-vendor environments.
The IN-VSN family has gained traction in the alternate channel market as
well. "The IBM vision for Enterprise Storage Networks requires us to provide
our customers with a network that grows as the business grows," stated Duane
Dueker, VP of SAN Marketing for IBM. "The scalability advantage of the
FC/9000 platform, in both 64- and 128-port configurations, is a key tool that
we leverage in building true enterprise-class storage networks."
The Road to Next-Generation SANs
The 128-port FC Director is available immediately for factory orders. In
keeping with INRANGE's tradition of investment-protection, users of the
64-port FC/9000 systems can migrate to 128-port models through simple field
upgrades. Today's announcement is another milepost in INRANGE's technology
roadmap announced last year that gives SAN users the means to build
large-scale storage networks that grow seamlessly as business requirements
dictate. However, just as important is the fact that the 128-port models are
a continuation of the INRANGE Extensible Core Architecture(TM) (XCA), the
industry's only `any-to-any, non-blocking' design that allows SAN switching to
scale to these levels without paying the latency performance penalty normally
associated with SANs of this size. Even as a customer grows its FC/9000 from
24 to 256 ports, the performance per port does not degrade.
"We see an increasing requirement for very scalable storage networking
solutions," stated John McArthur, Vice President of Worldwide Storage Research
at IDC. "INRANGE continues to advance scalability and capabilities for large
networks."
INRANGE's previously announced 2001 roadmap includes planned announcements
of technology that complements its Virtual Storage Networking strategy -- the
ability for SANs to communicate anywhere, anytime, over ubiquitous WAN and
optical networks. The existing IN-VSN solutions for optical networking (DWDM)
and channel extension will be complemented by Fibre Channel over WAN offerings
to be released over the next ninety days, further enabling SAN benefits to be
expanded beyond traditional geographical boundaries. In addition, with its
technology partner QLogic, INRANGE will provide 2GB and 256-port director
technologies later in 2001.
About INRANGE Technologies (www.inrange.com)
INRANGE Technologies designs, manufactures, markets and services
networking and switching products for storage, data and telecommunications
networks. Our products provide fast and reliable connections among networks
of computers and related devices and are used in global 2000 businesses and
other enterprises that operate large-scale and heterogeneous systems where
open connectivity, reliability, and continuous availability are critical. Our
products are designed to be compatible with various vendors' products and
multiple communication standards and protocols.
INRANGE and the INRANGE logo are registered trademarks of INRANGE
Technologies Corporation. IN-VSN and FC/9000 are trademarks of INRANGE
Technologies Corporation. All other trademarks and product names are the
property of their respective owners. |
