McDATA and GiantLoop Network Team Up Team


McDATA(R) Corporation and GiantLoop Network, Inc. this week announced an alliance that aims to extend the scalability and performance benefits of storage area networks (SANs) over all-optical metropolitan area networks (MANs).


“McDATA is committed to meeting our customers’ needs, and our customers are increasingly asking for solutions that extend their storage area networks over distance,” said Mike Gustafson, McDATA vice president of worldwide sales. “Partnering with GiantLoop, the leading provider of Enterprise Optical Networking services, allows McDATA to offer customers the benefits of inter-connected, metro SANs, with increased data availability, business continuity protection, and simplified management.”


The two companies plan to combine GiantLoop’s managed network and professional services with McDATA’s 6000 Series Director – a single stage 64-port director and its solution initiatives. The companies will collaborate on the sales, marketing, integration, and deployment of enterprise-class SANs, and the connectivity between those SANs over private, high-performance, enterprise optical networks.


“Before this partnership existed, there really were no true optical storage networking solutions available to the enterprise,” said Joe Gately, GiantLoop Network senior vice president of marketing and alliances. “Fibre Channel switches were delivered by server or storage subsystem vendors and viewed as a device extension. The GiantLoop/McDATA partnership means that enterprise customers can work with true networking experts to build enterprise-class SANs that extend across metropolitan areas. Together, GiantLoop and McDATA offer a unique set of products and services that offer immediate improvements in operations, management, and utilization, provide headroom for future storage and bandwidth growth, and marry storage and data networking.”


In addition to the market strategy, GiantLoop and McDATA plan to collaborate on strategic planning, research, and development to support GiantLoop’s Enterprise Content Networking initiative that addresses today’s data movement requirements like remote mirroring, backup, and data replication with future content delivery needs for eLearning, collaboration, and customer support.

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