News

posted on 01 July 2008 09:32

QLogic has introduced 8Gbit/s blades for its SANbox 9000 Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) switch and said it is focussing on the SME market.

The company has announced the 9008V 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel I/O blade for its SANbox 9000 modular chassis switch, along with a road map that includes support for 16Git/s Fibre Channel. A fully configured SANbox 9000 now provides SAN administrators with up to 256 8Gbit/s switch ports, enough to support hundreds of server and storage nodes - but not thousands.

QLogic is leaving the SAN director turf to Brocade and Cisco, stating 'SANbox 9000 business development will be focused on small to medium enterprises (SMEs), where the product has a proven track record of benefiting SAN administrators who need an affordable, long-term solution to build large fabrics.'

What's happening is that SMEs are adopting virtualized blade servers and rapidly increasing the number of ports that need access into their SANs.

In support of this point QLogic cites Brian Garrett, a technical director at ESG Lab, who said: "Small to medium enterprises are building large fabrics that require the port density, stability and manageability of a bladed chassis switch. However, these businesses are extremely price-sensitive and are looking for a cost-effective alternative to large directors. We've tested the SANbox 9000 (pictured), and with a modular design to accommodate future technologies plus leading edge performance, ESG is confident that the SANbox 9000 gives SMEs the value they need."

The 9008V has 16 8Gbit/s ports and, naturally, is fully backwards-compatible with existing 4 and 2Gbit/s FC devices. Jesse Parker, QLogic Network Solutions Group's VP and GM, said: "This highly versatile platform supports our long-term vision to give SME customers the essential enterprise-class storage networking features they need to build scalable, large fabrics."

QLogic has decioded it does not want to expand its product line upwards into the $250,000 and up core director-class switch market dominated by Brocade and Cisco. It's going to sit downmarket, undercutting Brocade and Cisco on proce, but hopefully not features, in the SME market for core FC fabric switches. It says that the SANbox 9000 architecture represents a number of industry firsts: a 4U modular chassis for a smaller footprint and cost-effective scalability, customer-replaceable units (CRUs) to eliminate costly service calls and a 10Gbit/s core-to-edge backbone enabling seamless SAN performance scaling in multi-switch environments.

The company is also preparing for the coming of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE) with CNAs - Converged Network Adapters, alongside its FC Host Bus Adapter (HBA) line, as well as having an InfiniBand product string to its bow which arch-rival Brocade does not have.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}