Taking heed of the impact fibre is making on storage area networking, enterprise storage specialist, EMC, has extended its fibre channel support and announced compatibility between its Symmetrix range and Sun and HP`s fibre channel hubs.
The significance of the development, according to Graham Prime, a senior product manager at EMC SA, is that companies with mixed IT platforms can now take real advantage of the emerging fibre channel standard.
"By offering hub support for HP and Sun Microsystems Unix servers, we believe we`re the only storage provider able to consolidate, manage, protect and share information from heterogeneous systems simultaneously across a fibre channel network," he says.
EMC has long incorporated the Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) data transfer interface in its products. With the advent of these fibre channel hubs, it is possible to attach up to 128 servers to each Symmetrix enterprise storage system across distances of up to 4kms.
Additional benefits include a five fold increase in data throughput - 100MB/sec per fibre channel interface versus 20MB/sec for fast-wide SCSI.
"With the consolidation of enterprise data onto our centralised storage, customers are benefiting twofold - they have a more efficient way of managing their information and they have cost greater efficiency," explains Prime.
"Previous connectivity options limited the number of connections and the distance between servers and storage systems. Fibre channel hub support overcomes that obstacle."
With the availability of point-to-point Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) connectivity to HP-UX and Sun Solaris servers, Symmetrix enterprise storage systems have become the first to provide simultaneous connectivity to multiple fibre channel Unix- and NT-based servers. EMC has been shipping Symmetrix fibre channel connectivity for HP-UX servers since August 1997.
In addition, Symmetrix remains the only single integrated storage system to provide simultaneous support for multiple Fibre Channel and other connectivity options.
Last quarter more than 20% of all Symmetrix systems revenue included Fibre Channel connectivity. To date, more than one-third of Symmetrix systems shipped with Fibre Channel connections have included Fibre Channel and either open systems Fast-Wide Differential SCSI, Ultra SCSI or mainframe ESCON connections.
About fibre channel hubs
Fibre Channel hubs are network devices that allow Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) connectivity among multiple servers, storage systems and other hubs on the storage network. Hubs provide a more reliable connection topology, more connections and greater distances than direct server-to-storage connectivity methods.
About fibre channel multiplexers
Fibre Channel multiplexers are network devices that provide connectivity and protocol conversion between a single Fibre Channel connection on a server and up to 4 SCSI ports on a previous-generation Symmetrix storage system. The multiplexer serves as the intermediary bridge between Fibre Channel data traffic from the server and SCSI data traffic from the storage system. These devices allow legacy servers and storage to participate in a Fibre Channel based Enterprise Storage Network.
Share
Editorial contacts