McData Releases New Fibre Channel SAN Switch for Mid-Range Market

McDATA Corp. has released a new Fibre Channel SAN switch for the mid-range market. Designed to fill the needs of small-to-midsize enterprises, the McDATA Sphereon is the the world’s only 24-port SAN switch and offers “connectivity on demand” in 8-port increments through McDATA’s FlexPort Technology.

McDATA is also packaging every Sphereon 4500 with its all-new, Web-based SANpilot management software, which provides all the features necessary to manage small SAN fabrics.

Features found in the McDATA Sphereon include:

• FlexPort Technology, which provides non-disruptive “connectivity on demand,” in 8-port increments
  
• 24-port building block, which provides incremental connectivity for
  50-percent more connectivity than competitive offerings, dramatically
  reducing cost of ownership while assuring unparalleled ease of
  scalability
  
• HotCAT, hot code load and activation, redundant power and cooling,
  and hot-plug capable transceivers
  
• The industry’s highest port density: 24 ports in 1u high (1.75″) chassis,
  which maximizes floor space;
  
• Full 2Gb/s non-blocking performance on all 24 ports
  with very low latency;
  
• Fibre Channel and loop connectivity, directly attaching disk or tape and
  maximizing storage utilization;
  
• Single Enterprise OS (E/OS) provides a common operating system across
  all McDATA Director and Switch products
  

The Sphereon 4500 can be purchased as an entry-level eight-port switch and upgraded with a software license key to a 16-port and 24-port solution. This all can be done without installing a new switch.

Included with every Sphereon 4500 is McDATA’s latest SAN-management software, SANpilot, an all-new, embedded, Web-accessible management tool. SANpilot offers the following features:

• Fabric and topology views
  
• Zoning configuration
  
• Performance monitoring
  
• FlexPort configuration
  
• Health monitoring and fault isolation
  
• Online Help
  

The McDATA Sphereon 4500 is available today through all of McDATA’s resellers and systems integrators. McDATA anticipates its OEMs and master resellers, including EMC, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM, will make the Sphereon 4500 available to their end-user customers and channel partners, with the majority scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of 2002. Pricing information was not made public.