Over the last few quarters McData has borne the brunt of Cisco Systems Inc’s attack on the storage market, and has seen its market share slide. Cisco’s offensive began at the top end of the SAN market, where McData makes most of its money.
The Intrepid 10000 launched by McData today is the company’s latest flagship device, and will do battle at the very top of the market. It will not replace McData’s previous flagship device, the Intrepid 6000, but will sell alongside it, and cost about 20% to 25% more, according to McData.
Whether it will be good enough to fix the company’s problems is not clear. It’s definitely competitive, and it makes McData’s hand stronger, but I don’t know if it will get them out of trouble. There are a lot of other factors, said Arun Taneja, analyst at the Taneja Group.
Among a raft of new features, probably the most important qualities of the i10000 are its size in terms of port-count, and its ability to be partitioned into multiple domains.
The device sports 256 ports, heavily outclassing Brocade Communications Systems Inc’s largest box, which offers only 128 ports, or the 140 ports of the largest full-service configuration from Cisco. Only CNT Corp, a much smaller rival than Brocade or Cisco, can offer a director of the same 256 port size.
At this size, the ability to partition a director into multiple logical devices is crucial, according to Taneja. The i10000 is McData’s first device with this feature, which is based on the technology McData gained when it bought start-up Sanera in 2003.
Not all of Sanera’s goods have been built into the i10000, however. Although the new box supports the latest 10Gb version of Fibre Channel, unlike Cisco’s devices it doesn’t natively support the iSCSI or iFCP protocols. McData does not plan for that to happen, and is instead promising that by year-end the separate boxes needed for this job will be integrated logically appearing as one device with the director but not physically. McData said this will spare the eed to consume expensive director slots.
That plan does not square with Taneja’s view of what customers want. There’s some leeway in the market there, but not a huge amount, he said. Customers will tolerate having to use a separate box for a while, but I’d say McData needs to have something here in the next six months or year.
The smart switch ability of the i0000 to host storage applications is still a little way off. McData would say nothing on this topic other than to repeat earlier promises to ship this technology later in 2005.
According to McData, the i10000 creates a new class of director, which it calls carrier or backbone class. But it is easy to see this as a marketing effort to help sell the latest box by highlighting its high-end features, because the device is not fundamentally different to other directors. It’s a very fine distinction. I’m not sure the industry needs this new classification, Taneja said.
The device is being qualified by OEMs now, and will ship to customers this quarter, McData said.
