Storage networking solutions vendor McDATA(R) Corporation and IBM today announced the expansion of their worldwide reseller agreement.
Under the agreement, IBM, which currently resells McDATA’s ED-5000 Enterprise Director, will also resell all of McDATA’s ‘enterprise-to-edge’ family of products. These products include McDATA’s fibre channel director, and its department and workgroup level switches as well as its software management products.
IBM vice president of marketing for SANs Duane Dueker said, “our relationship with McDATA has been augmented by the increased acceptance of Enterprise Storage Servers (SHARK) in the marketplace. With approximately 50 percent of SHARKS shipping with fibre channel, this is another example of IBM gaining leadership in the storage area network space.”
According to McDATA, in addition to the ED-5000 Director, McDATA’s current family of products and software include the ES-3016 Switch, a departmental product that encompasses many of the high availability features found in data center offerings, the ES-1000 Loop Switch, an end-to-end switching solution, and the Enterprise Fabric Connectivity Manager (EFC Manager), which enables IT managers to manage all switched components from a single console.
In related news, data storage provider Datalink Corporation today announced plans to integrate McDATA’s enterprise-class Director product in its large-scale information storage architectures.
According to Datalink, the partnership will boost the scope of both Datalink and McDATA’s customer base while providing customers full-service, integrated, enterprise-wide storage area networking (SAN) solutions.
“This new relationship with McDATA allows Datalink to offer a greater level of availability for mission critical environments,” said Scott Robinson, Chief Technology Officer, Datalink. “McDATA Directors enhance our ability to meet our customers’ growing needs for increased manageability and scalability — especially in large-scale, complex SAN infrastructures. Our independence gives us the flexibility to choose from the best technologies available in the industry. The high performance and unique functionality of the McDATA products enhances our ability to provide state-of-the-art solutions for our customers.”
