INRANGE Technologies today announced general availability of the IN-VSN(TM) Virtual Link/9000 Fibre Channel Extender “distance technology” that, according to the company, lets Storage Area Network (SAN) managers extend fibre channel traffic across wide area networks to support disk mirroring, storage sharing, centralized backup, and other key business applications.
Users can deploy the VL/9000 between INRANGE’s FC/9000(TM) Fibre Channel Director and remote storage devices or between a host and remote storage devices to, INRANGE claims, cost-effectively bridge sites and make distributed systems appear and perform as if they were located on the local SAN.
In its initial offering, the VL/9000 supports Unix and NT server environments, providing full gigabit per second Fibre Channel and Ultra 2 SCSI networking over unlimited distances across ATM backbones. Support for Gigabit Ethernet networks is expected to be available at the end of the second quarter, 2001.