McData
iSCSI and iFCP Networking Ability Expands with Purchase of
Nishan Systems
McData is due to release the
first fruit of its acquisition of Nishan Systems later today.
The Eclipse 1620 is a gateway device, connecting heterogeneous
Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage networks either locally or
over IP links.
Like
Nishan's products, it uses iFCP (internet Fibre Channel
protocol) which links SAN devices selectively. By comparison,
the alternative FCIP technology used by vendors such as Cisco,
Lucent and CNT creates tunnels between networks.
Using
iFCP allows SANs to be linked over a public IP network with
fault isolation, according to Mark Stratton, McData's director
of marketing solutions and alliances. A fault on one SAN will
propagate to the others over an FCIP tunnel, but not via iFCP,
he says.
"The
1620 is a kind of shadow switch," he adds. "It can
make remote devices look local and then provision them by
setting up sessions between devices, whereas tunnelling masks
that by passing all traffic."
"You
can also use it as an iSCSI gateway - it does iSNS and domain
discovery. The goal there is to propagate storage
consolidation to lower cost servers. The name of the game is
to efficiently aggregate more servers so it gets cheaper
overall."
The
next task is to qualify the device with replication software
such as Truecopy and SRDF, he says.
Stratton
would not confirm pricing for the Eclipse 1620, but says it
should not be too far from the Nishan 3300 device at $30,000
each, or $150,000 for a complete SAN disaster recovery or
business continuity solution.
He
confirms that the integration of Nishan into McData is well
underway, with Nishan's office lease expiring soon and its
employees moving in with McData's SANavigator software group.
"The
Nishan brand has gone - everything is labelled McData now, but
it's the same technology, dropped straight into the McData
range," he adds.
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