Rubrik: World-wide News/ Products & News

SANRAD: iSCSI SANs Have Shattered the Cost Barriers for SAN Deployment

SANRAD Stands Out from the iSCSI Crowd

(02.02.04) - SANRAD has unveiled new IP storage networking switches that the company says can deliver a complete 2-terabyte IP SAN solution for "well under 30,000 Dollar." The V-Switch 2000 is a new version of SANRAD's enterprise-class V-Switch 3000 that has been optimized for common business applications in mid-range and departmental environments. The V-Switch 2000 and 3000 run on the same SANRAD StoragePro software, for full availability and network-based management of storage resources across standard Ethernet environments. The multi-protocol/multi-port V-Switch 2000 includes protocol bridging, storage routing, switching, security, load-balancing, high availability, storage virtualization, and volume management within a single management platform.

Nancy Marrone-Hurley, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group, says SANRAD's new offering differs from products from McDATA, Cisco, and others "that are simply iSCSI/IP gateways. SANRAD is calling their products switches, although I would say they are certainly more than a switch."

The SANRAD V-3000 has a number of advanced features, Marrone-Hurley says, such as replication, snapshot, migration, and volume management capability, "which move this into more of an intelligent platform category, which we define as switches that can run intelligent storage services. This type of product enables users to set up highly functional IP SANs, with many of the features and benefits of advanced FC SANs.

"SANRAD is bringing a great deal more value to the customer than simply allowing them to share data across FC and IP networks," she continues. "I believe this type of solution will help accelerate the adoption of iSCSI."

SANRAD says iSCSI SANs "have shattered the cost barriers for SAN deployment, enabling any business to install an IP-based SAN for a fraction of the cost of a similar capacity Fibre Channel solution. The new V-Switch 2000 moves the cost advantage to the next level, opening up the benefits of storage networking and centralized storage administration to a new class of customers."

The switch's storage management and virtualization functions protect investments in existing DAS, NAS, and SAN storage by gathering all physical storage resources (SCSI, iSCSI, and FC) into a single pool, according to SANRAD. Network administrators can define new logical volumes from these pooled resources without being limited by physical barriers such as enclosures, physical disks, protocols, and distance.

The StoragePro suite combines block-based storage access, data continuity, volume creation and management, and traffic optimization to address all storage performance and provisioning needs, the company says.

Data Continuity Services make sure that the V-Switch 2000 meets the availability requirements for corporate SANs by incorporating a broad range of high-availability features, around-the-clock data availability, and business continuity, including integrated data mirroring and path failover functionality, clustering and continual monitoring, and data access fail-over (active-active switch fail-over, Fibre Channel port fail-over, iSCSI port fail-over, and storage system fail-over).

The V-Switch 2000 costs 12,500 Dollar and requires no host agents or license fees for additional servers or storage. A V-Switch SAN is also available starting at less than 30,000 Dollar. (Paul Shread/ma)

SANRAD

Contact: Yuval Shilansky, Regional Sales Manager

Tel. (00972-3) 767-4844, Fax (00972-3) 647-4104

E-Mail: yshilan@sanrad.com

Web: www.sanrad.com