McData’s SAN serve
Switch’s flexibility may mark a turing point: Giving customers what they want
FOLLOWING THE evolution of storage technology is like watching a tennis match. Action shifts suddenly from one side of the court to the other, forcing you to continually twist your neck to track the ball.
The latest serve in the storage networking field comes from McData, which just announced a new fabric switch that goes by the somewhat unglamorous name of “Sphereon 4500” but distances itself from other units of the same family and from competitors with its flexibility.
Imagine a 1U fabric switch that you can purchase with eight-port capacity and upgrade to 16 or 24 ports on your rack as your requirements evolve, all without using a screwdriver and — hold onto your seat — without disrupting the data flow on existing ports?
The Sphereon 4500 can do this. You do have to purchase a software license key and install some additional optics, but the additional ports themselves are already built in. But really, the update boils down to an easy-to-implement, menu-driven software change to your Sphereon 4500. Add more connectors (point-to-point or arbitrated loop) to your ports, and you’ve doubled or tripled the switch’s capacity on the fly.
At McData they call this technology FlexPort, while the HotCAT (hot code load and activation) feature makes it possible to load software — say a new firmware — again without stopping your business. McData’s new, double-capacity Intrepid 6140 director switch offers the same feature.
Add a new architecture, based on a single powerful ASIC that delivers 2Gbps to each port, and consider the built-in redundancy, bundled SAN Pilot management software, and an undisclosed purchase price (McData won’t disclose the price, leaving the last say to OEMs and resellers) that is expected to leave rival solutions in the dust, and we have a potential winner. Need we remind you that no other fabric switch comes close to 24-port density in 1U?
McData does realize its competitors are not far behind. The company freely admits that Brocade and Cisco will soon likely lob new switches with 32-port densities, although they’ll probably not be expandable like Sphereon. McData does have designs to expand the Sphereon line and will have another switch in the 4000 family by end of 2003.
The really good news here is that storage vendors are beginning to focus on designing products that fit the actual needs of their target customers. With components becoming cheaper, vendors no longer need to borrow from older architectures, designed for different markets, to bring down and sell to a smaller market.
In other words, customers are going to finally get value and technology that does what they need, something that should make people more eager to buy.
