At Storage Networking World this week, Lucent Technologies is demonstrating a technology that it says enables a single device to cost-effectively provide high-speed interconnection of storage area networks (SANs) over regional and long-distance backbones.
According to Lucent, using this technology, the Lucent’s OptiStar(TM) EdgeSwitch can now cost-effectively deliver Fibre Channel to data centers and storage facilities that are separated by great distances. The technology, known as Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), is a standards-based technology co-authored by Lucent Technologies and leading storage networking vendors. On its own, native Fibre Channel traffic cannot travel more than 10 kilometers in a network, and thus cannot be used for wide-area service delivery. Sitting at the intersection of the SAN and the WAN, the OptiStar EdgeSwitch uses the new FCIP technology to place Fibre Channel data into IP packets, allowing both block-and file-level storage traffic to be routed over the IP WANs along with IP data traffic.
Tim Sullivan, chief operating officer of Lucent’s Optical Networking Group, said, “Using FCIP, service providers now can add storage to their menu of service offerings, and enterprises can more effectively manage, share and protect their increasingly important data resources residing at locations around the globe.”
The FCIP capability is set to be generally available on the OptiStar EdgeSwitch later this quarter.