News Briefs - Storage:

Sanbolic Supports Cisco MDS 9000 Family Of SAN Switches

Sanbolic Inc., a leading developer and manufacturer of storage area network (SAN) software for shared storage solutions, announced that its shared file system, Melio FS , and clustered volume management software, LaScala , are now qualified as interoperable with Cisco's MDS 9000 family of storage area networking directors and fabric switches. The combined functionality of these products will allow customers to deploy simplified SAN architectures with concurrent access to shared files over Fibre Channel or iSCSI block transport.

The qualification of Melio FS and LaScala VM with the Cisco MDS 9000 was driven by increasing customer requests for a very high-performance shared storage platform. Today, a fully operational combined Sanbolic/Cisco installation is already in place at a key beta customer site, currently delivering 1GB/s of data with a throughput of almost 200MB/s per server, in a five server environment.

Over the last few months, Sanbolic has been conducting extensive interoperability testing based on Cisco specifications, designed to demonstrate support and manageability. The two companies have also signed a cooperative support agreement that will meet the specific needs of mutual customers whose installations include products provided by both companies.

The award-winning Cisco MDS 9000 Family is a comprehensive line of SAN switches for storage networks of all sizes and architectures. Comprised of the Cisco MDS 9500 series directors, the Cisco MDS 9216 flexible-configuration fabric switch, and the Cisco MDS 9100 series fabric switches, these solutions are designed to offer high performance and scalability and deliver intelligent network services such as multiprotocol/multitransport integration, Virtual SANs (VSANs), security, advanced traffic management, sophisticated diagnostics and unified SAN management.

"Sanbolic's products offer volume and logical management across multiple hosts and disks systems, which drive more intelligence into the SAN, while reducing the complexities and costs of managing across diverse servers and array systems," said Bill Erdman, Technology Alliance Director within Cisco's Storage Technology Group. "The collaboration between Cisco and Sanbolic will help customers take advantage of these intelligent storage features across a scalable and high-performance SAN environment."

Sanbolic's advanced clustered file system and clustered volume manager have been designed specifically for networked storage and enable users to manage networked storage as a single pool of data, greatly reducing complexity and giving users much more flexibility in how they can access their data. LaScala is a transactional clustered volume manager that enables very high performance aggregation of performance across storage controllers and centralized management, while Melio FS enables simultaneous read and write access to files from multiple servers.

"Sanbolic's goal with networked storage is to simplify customer environments while providing applications with high bandwidth shared access to data, " said Chris Hurley, Sanbolic's VP of Sales and Marketing." Cisco's switch platform provides tremendous performance as well as the flexibility to incorporate iSCSI access to shared data. It also provides an ideal future platform to migrate LaScala volume management into the network."