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LightSand Enables Synchronous Mirroring Over 100's Of Miles

LightSand, a developer of High Performance Wide Area Storage Networks has announced that its Fibre Channel WAN switches have successfully completed multiple Beta trials and are now released for general availability.

"We are aiming to solve real customer pain points -- it's currently hard to move terabytes of data over distance. Until now, remote replication has generally been restricted to asynchronous operation with a potential risk of data loss in a disaster." said LightSand CEO Philip Black. "Our S-600 and S-2500 switches now enable synchronous mirroring over hundreds of miles, providing an essential piece of a business continuity strategy. In addition, our E_Port connectivity enables us to create one enterprise-wide SAN Fabric, allowing SAN management technologies such as BlueFin and EMC's Auto IS to manage multiple geographically dispersed data centers as a single enterprise-wide SAN."

The S-600 and S-2500 extend native Fibre Channel or Gigabit Ethernet over distance using readily available high Quality of Service infrastructure such as SONET, WDM or DWDM. Both products connect to local SAN switches as E_Port devices. In this role, they preserve and physically extend the full integrity of the SAN fabric over great distances, merging geographically separated SAN "islands" into one unified SAN system that enables full enterprise wide use of zoning.

LightSand's S-2500 operates at speeds of 2.488 gigabits per second over OC-48c and comes with three local ports that can be individually configured for Fibre Channel or Gigabit Ethernet. The S-600 runs at speeds of 622 megabits per second over OC-12c/STM-4c networks and has two configurable Fibre Channel/Gigabit Ethernet ports. Both models can be connected to SONET, WDM or DWDM on the WAN side. When used in conjunction with DWDM extension equipment, the S-2500 can improve bandwidth utilization as much as 200%, providing up to three full rate Fibre Channel signals per wavelength and extending distances up to 8,000 Km.

About LightSand

LightSand develops High Performance Wide Area Storage Networking equipment that is optimized for moving massive amounts of data over distance. The company's first products are switching gateways that interconnect SAN islands using readily available SONET infrastructure. With these SAN extensions, organizations can ensure business continuity through remotely replicated data, move large amounts of information across the organization and centralize storage management. LightSand is a privately held company with headquarters in Milpitas, California.