Believe it or not, yet another group has formed to develop compatible, off-the-shelf fiber channel storage area networking (SAN) equipment, this time headed-up by Seagate Technology Inc and Bell Microproducts. The two companies plan to package up the basic building blocks of a SAN for resellers, which they say will help them get a foot-up into this market. So far the SANPower channel program includes Seagate, Bell Microproducts, ATTO, CS Electronics, Gadzoox Networks, Mercury, Mylex, Qlogic, Veritas Software and Xyratex. Seagate expects more vendors onboard as gains recognition.
Nancy Kuehn, product marketing manager for Seagate’s enterprise storage group acknowledged that there are already several initiatives under way in this space all attempting to interoperate between products, but she said this group is focused explicitly on the needs of VARs and resellers. They are hungry for this market, she said, but it is difficult for them to go to distributors and purchase products that operate together because the market is so fractured. Kuehn believes that the SAN market is not as competitive as it was six months ago and that slowly the various groups are beginning to work together.
IDC forecasts that by 2002 fibre channel will account for 31% of enterprise shipments and fibre channel open systems will continue to increase as a percentage of enterprise storage revenue. Seagate said customers in digital content creation, internet, financial, gas and oil exploration, medical imaging and other fibre channel vertical markets will benefit from this program as they require extensive data management and bandwidth capabilities. The package will be sold as a turnkey solution with the option to purchase extra hubs, switches, bridges, software, tap backup drives and additional disk drives that can be integrated into the package when required. Bell Microproducts will provide the sales, technical support and training.
In a separate announcement, Gadzoox Networks Inc will be showing its SAN switch technology on Thursday at the Fibre Channel Technologies Conference and Expo at the San Jose Convention Center and the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Gadzoox will also be providing presentations on SAN technology as well as demonstrating a high availability server storage cluster based on Microsoft’s Windows 2000 server, with the Gadzoox Capellix 3000 modular SAN switch.
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