McDATA Corporation today announced that its 6000 Series Director: ED-6064 now provides FICON support for IBM’s mainframes, Enterprise Storage Server (ESS), and the Magstar 3590 A60 tape controller. According to McData, it has achieved for the first time a complete FICON network, tying together both open systems and mainframe channels, directors, disk storage and tape.
“McDATA’s Director class switch is a proven technology that has been installed in major accounts for more than two years,” said Bill North, IDC Director of Research for Storage Software. “Integrating FICON and Fibre Channel traffic through a single storage area network delivers greater usability, easier management, and lower total cost of ownership to end-users.”
McData says both mainframe and open systems environments can use the same product, McDATA’s 6000 Series Director: ED-6064, enabling customers to use the same hardware platform and expect the same management capabilities for both mainframe and open systems requirements. Using common products means lower costs and higher investment protection to the customer.
“Our customers can now implement a common open standards-based Fibre Channel infrastructure which can potentially lower costs, simplify management and expand investment protection. This is a major milestone in our strategic business alliance with McDATA,” said Barry Rudolph, IBM vice president, disk storage systems and software. “The availability of end-to-end solutions combining IBM zSeries servers, IBM pSeries and xSeries servers, McDATA Enterprise Fibre Channel Directors with the IBM Enterprise Storage Server (ESS) is a significant technical achievement.”
“IBM’s support of the ED-6064 on FICON ESS takes full advantage of McDATA’s experience and leadership in the ESCON, FICON and Fibre Channel markets as McDATA expands its offerings into the burgeoning FICON market,” said Mike Gustafson, vice president of worldwide sales for McDATA. “McDATA’s 6000 Series Director: ED-6064 is at the core of that FICON connection. What this means to the customer is a less expensive, easier to manage storage network that performs better and protects their prior investments.”
