With an emphasis on extended failover, EMC Corp. has released a new version of its PowerPath software that includes full end-to-end automated path failover for networked storage environments -- the first such capability in the network-storage market, according to EMC officials.

PowerPath's automated path failover extends from the server, through the network switch to the storage system. In the case of failure, PowerPath's latest enhancements enable the server to continue processing I/O requests to an alternate Fibre Channel adapter on the EMC Symmetrix Enterprise storage system in the event of path failure.

Failover is becoming one of the hottest areas of network storage, adding another layer of redundancy to network storage. In the event of an I/O path failure, instead of having that single point of failure being a dead end (thus negatively impacting the network), the storage network is smart enough to reroute application data and storage data to either another host bus adapter or to an alternate Symmetrix Fibre Channel adapter.

Also new in the upgraded PowerPath release is support for Novell NetWare 5.0 (SP6a), 5.1 (SP2) and Novell Cluster Services 1.1. Previously PowerPath supported Windows NT/2000, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, HP-UX and Compaq Tru64.