CNT has unveiled a new storage networking platform that the company says represents a new class of director.
CNT Solutions Marketing Director Patty Barkley calls the platform “the first multi-service director,” bringing new services and scalability to director-class switches.
Barkley says the company’s new UltraNet Multi-service Director (UMD) has the high-availability and RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) features of traditional directors, plus active-active load sharing and fail-over capabilities, completely hot swappable components, advanced diagnostics, and new reporting capabilities. It offers scalability in ports, protocols and speeds, with an upgrade path that runs the gamut from 1Gbps to 10Gbps.
Services offered include security, WAN and MAN extension, virtualization, replication and management.
The UMD is built on CNT’s UltraScale architecture, and provides 5 Tbps of system throughput for as many as 512 non-blocking ports at 4Gbps data rates. The company says its non-blocking and low-latency design delivers consistent performance across every port regardless of load, avoiding the need to design around hot spots and load spikes.
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| The UMD offers scalability in ports, protocols and speeds, with an upgrade path that runs from 1Gbps to 10Gbps. |
“CNT has integrated key services, such as Quality of Service (QoS), data replication and copy services, extension services with hardware compression and management services into the UltraNet Multi-service Director,” states Dianne McAdam, senior analyst and partner at Data Mobility Group. “Customers now have one single management interface that simplifies the monitoring, reporting and debugging of storage networks connecting geographically separated data centers.”
Jamie Gruener, program manager at the Yankee Group, says the UMD “needs to be on the short list for enterprises looking for a director that should be able to consolidate multiple fabric directors and switches no matter what kinds of network protocols are used.”
Pricing will be set by CNT’s OEM partners, but the company says customers will be able to start small and grow with the platform as their needs evolve, making the UMD an option for small and medium businesses and enterprise customers looking to consolidate SAN islands, implement information lifecycle management (ILM), or migrate from DAS to SAN.
The UMD-16, the first model to be released in the family, supports up to 256 non-blocking ports of FICON and Fibre Channel. Additional models include the UMD-2 for departmental and remote data centers; UMD-7 for mid-sized businesses or small data centers; and the UMD-32, designed for service providers or very large organizations.
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