SAN JOSE, April 28 /PRNewswire/ -- SAN Valley Systems, a pioneer and leader in SAN expansion, today announced it has begun shipping its next generation SAN expansion product, the SL2100 FCIP Gateway. The SL2100 is the third member of the FCIP gateway family of products at SAN Valley and is designed for IT organizations that need to interconnect geographically distributed SANs without sacrificing performance or jeopardizing business continuity. The SL2100 demonstrates the company's continuing commitment to develop industry-leading products to manage SAN expansion in both the IP and Fibre Channel markets.

The SL2100 is designed with a single Fibre Channel (FC) to Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) channel with one FC port and one GbE port which enables it to achieve a total throughput of over 2 Gbps over IP networks -- making it the fastest of its kind on the market. Unparalleled performance along with industry leading interoperability and a high availability design makes the SL2100 ideal for enabling the deployment of mission critical applications on FC SANs and storage resources over IP and optical networks. This ability to interconnect SANs across MANs/WANs with synchronous data replication, always-available connectivity, and support for remote backup and recovery at wire-speed performance positions the SL2100 as the must-have device for any enterprise that is planning to, or has deployed multiple SANs and wants to maximize the return on their investment, improve their business continuance and disaster recovery preparedness.

"In the last 12 months, we have seen a strong and continuously growing demand for SAN Valley products as customers increasingly interconnect their geographically dispersed SANs," said Sandy Helton, president of SAN Valley. "The SL2100 delivers significantly higher performance over greater distances than anyone else in the market. Our routers were the very first Fibre Channel products to connect SANs over IP networks, and we led the standards initiatives to assure product interoperability over IP networks."

"The SAN Valley solution is filling a key niche as we expand our services with customers. It's helped us be more competitive," says James Sakaguchi, VP of Customer Support Business Unit and Professional Technical Services (Grass Valley Group), Thomson Broadcast and Media Solutions. "In our opinion, the SL2100 represents a major advantage doing Fibre Channel over IP when integrated with our Profile server solutions."

The new SAN Valley SL2100 is unmatched in its performance, interoperability, high availability and ease-of-management and offers a comprehensive set of features that ensures always-available storage across the SAN, MAN, and WAN. Its advanced traffic management system, which includes QoS and traffic shaping, ensures storage traffic is given appropriate prioritization on the network. The SL2100 with its SAN-friendly TCP optimization ensures reliable and expedient delivery of storage traffic across congested and unmanaged networks.

    Other features of the SL200 include:
    -- Hardware optimized for low latency with port speeds (full duplex):
        -- FC:      1.0625 Gbaud (1&2 Gigabit switch link compatible)
        -- GbE:     1.25 Gbaud
    -- Fully FCIP(1) compliant.  Also supported:  FC-PH, FC-PH2, FC-PH3, and
       FC-SW2.  GbE:  IEEE802.3z (1000BaseSX), IEEE802.1Q (VLAN tagging)
    -- Policy-based TCP bandwidth management/traffic shaping
    -- B-port implementation for greater distance capability
    -- Redundant power and cooling systems
    -- Comprehensive management and performance monitoring tools

About SAN Valley Systems

SAN Valley Systems developed the industry's first Fibre Channel over IP SAN expansion product and leads the market in the deployment of standards-based SAN expansion products. SAN Valley's products are protocol independent and support Fibre Channel and Internet Protocols and hence, interoperate seamlessly with other best in class networking, SAN and optical technologies to provide high performance, end-to-end storage networking solutions. Customers include industry leaders like Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Company headquarters are located in San Jose, California with sales offices throughout the U.S. and Europe. For more information, please refer to the company's web site: www.sanvalley.com.

NOTE: SAN Valley, SAN Valley Systems and the SAN Valley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAN Valley. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

     (1) FCIP is an IETF standard for Fibre Channel over Internet Protocol.
         FCIP is intended to improve interoperability of Fibre Channel and IP
         based devices.