Sphereon gets SAN ball rolling for small business
Sphereon gets SAN ball rolling for small business
McData will pitch the new device in its Sphereon range of Fibre Channel switches to what it calls the "mid-range market" of storage area network users.
The company claimed that its Sphereon 4500 Fabric Switch was the world's only storage area network (SAN) switch, and is bundling its Web-based SANPilot management application with the switch to help small-to-midsize enterprises manage growing storage needs. McData also claimed that the 4500 had the highest port density in the industry, with 24 ports per one rack unit running at a maximum throughput of 2Gbps.
Small businesses who don't want to bear huge upfront costs can open ports in 8-port increments using a proprietary technology called FlexPort which the company said delivered "connectivity on demand".
McData said it expected to garner 30 per cent of the mid-range Fibre Channel switch market, where it will compete with Cisco, Brocade, QLogic and others. While the big hope for lowering the cost of storage switches has been the iSCSI protocol, the 4500 is Fibre Channel only.
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