Vendors to display pioneering SAN installation
Vendors to display pioneering SAN installation
Oct 21, 2004: Storage networking vendor Emulex will be among a group of leading storage technology providers that will jointly present the industry's first fully interoperable multi-vendor 4Gb SAN in a live demonstration at next week's Storage Networking World 2000 Conference in Orlando, Florida.
In addition to demonstrating interoperable 4Gb products and capabilities, the demonstration will also integrate 2Gb components to underscore seamless backward compatibility with existing SAN infrastructure.
"With the impending transition to 4Gb Fibre Channel in switches, HBAs and storage devices, IT managers need assurance that new products from different suppliers will interoperate. They also need to know that products will be backward-compatible with installed products," said Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems research at IDC. "Technology demonstrations like this will help companies effectively plan for this transition so that they can take advantage of the performance and price benefits of 4Gb Fibre Channel technology."
The demonstration of SAN performance and functionality uses multiple vendor equipment at 2Gb and the new double data rate of 4Gb. It includes three servers feeding data to the SAN through 4Gb HBAs provided by Emulex and QLogic and a 4Gb Fibre Channel adapter from Agilent Technologies. Fabric switches provided by QLogic concurrently run both speed links to the storage targets. Multiple Xyratex storage enclosures are equipped with Seagate drives and feature a switched back-end architecture created with Emulex embedded storage switches. Additional technologies for the demonstration were supplied by Finisar, Intel and JDS Uniphase.
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