INRANGE Technologies and IBM Corporation this week announced that the INRANGE IN-VSN FC/9000(TM) Fibre Channel Director has completed IBM qualification testing and is fully supported through IBM for FICON connectivity in IBM’s TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server (ESS) networks.
According to the companies, FICON support for the FC/9000 is the latest milestone in INRANGE’s business relationship with IBM, in which IBM remarkets and services both the 64-port and 128-port models of INRANGE’s fibre channel directors to open systems and FICON storage networks.
“We have been relying on the combination of IBM’s TotalStorage Enterprise Tape Controller 3590 A60 and the INRANGE FC/9000 to ensure fast, smooth data flow for our FICON tape processing,” said Wolfgang Dungl, Capacity and Performance Manager at iT-Austria. “The evolution from ESCON to FICON requires the very same scale, performance, and tight integration that IBM and INRANGE have been providing us.”
“IBM enterprise users have become accustomed to large-scale, mission-critical infrastructures to support seamless information flow,” said Barry Rudolph, IBM vice president, disk storage systems and software. “Through our relationship with INRANGE and the 128-port capacity of the FC/9000, IBM is positioned to meet the large-scale storage requirements that FICON ESS is designed to address.”