Inrange Technologies announced today it began a controlled introduction at the end of December 2001 for what it said is the industry’s first 256-port fibre channel director.
Inrange said the newest model of its IN-VSN FC/9000 family of directors features four times the capacity of other directors or switch products currently shipping. It provides users with a fully redundant, non-blocked switching core on which to expand storage networks — comprised of a wide range of open systems and FICON devices — to the largest enterprise levels.
“By providing a single platform with 100% of the ports local and available, we’re eliminating management headaches like interswitch links, capacity planning, and load balancing — which helps to control costs,” stated Sherrie Woodring, acting INRANGE President and CEO. “Our customers can deploy, manage, and expand storage networks easily on a stable, high- availability architecture designed from the ground up to support large numbers of heterogeneous devices. For high-growth enterprise networks, this translates to faster ROI on storage investments, and unmatched investment protection.”
An FC/9000-256 unit was delivered to an IBM interoperability testing site in December 2001 as part of the controlled introduction.
“We are excited to begin interoperability testing of the high availability, ultra-scalable 256-port INRANGE Director which we believe will help address key requirements of our enterprise storage networking customers,” stated Barry Rudolph, IBM vice president, product management.
