The 2640 also features three layers of performance acceleration to rapidly
McData moved to slingshot past rivals Monday, unveiling
a router that shuttles data across networks with significant performance and
connectivity improvements. The device also has heterogeneous vendor support.
The Eclipse 2640 is a 1U (1.75 inches), 16-port storage area network (SAN)
with the remaining four ports GbE.
The 2640 is a considerable upgrade over the Eclipse 1620, which was rolled out last
year. That box, based on technology from McData’s acquisition of Nishan Systems, is geared for small businesses and has
two GbE and two fibre channel ports.
While the 1620 provided fibre channel distance connectivity and iSCSI
routing, including fibre channel to IP
different from rivals’ routers, which Dougherty said are focused on
homogeneous routing.
“[Competitors] don’t really route across the network, they do what’s called
tunneling,” said Dougherty. “What true routing means is that we are actively
filtering packets and filtering activity that gets propagated from the
ingress port to the egress port on the box.”
By contrast, Dougherty said routers from competitors “tunnel,” a technique that encapsulates fibre channel SAN frames in IP
packets for transport to another distant Fibre Channel SAN by tunneling them
through an IP network. When they arrive at the second SAN, the fibre channel
frames are released from their encapsulation.
The executive said the tunneling technique can propagate things like state change
notifications, which are management storms that can occur due to a link
instability and adversely impact performance and contribute to latency.
zip data across the network. For example, a feature called “fast write”
enables the 2640 to “spoof” the storage protocol and allow data to stream
over extended distances.
Second, a new compression engine can be programmed to propel data. The third
layer is that the 2640 terminates the TCP
providing high-speed performance over the link to span great distances.
As the second generation of routers from the Bloomfield, Colo., company, the
Eclipse 2640 is also the first router to work with gear from rivals Cisco
Systems and Brocade Communications Systems
.
“It has the ability to interconnect McData fibre channel networks with those
from Brocade, Cisco and QLogic via one box to serve as the nexus of the
network and route data intelligently between multi-vendor fabrics,” said
Peter Dougherty, vice president of switch platforms at McData.
Such heterogeneity in a storage network has proven to be quite attractive to
customers, many of whom have products from different vendors and have
challenge getting those products to work together. There is a broad movement
afoot in the storage industry among vendors to provide support for disparate
platforms.
Available now, the 2640 box costs around $100,000. Actual pricing is based
on configurations and the number of features used.
The 2640 arrives a week after Cisco upgraded
its MDS 9000 router family. The MDS 9216i fabric switch and the
Multiprotocol Services Module, feature Ethernet ports that can support Fibre
Channel over IP or iSCSI.
McData Launches Speedy New SAN Router
