INRANGE and IBM announce strategic partnership to support IBM’s FICON Enterprise Storage Serve

Added: (Mon Dec 03 2001)

Pressbox (Press Release) - INRANGE Technologies, a leader in scaleable storage networking solutions and the IBM Corporation have announced a strategic partnership to accelerate the move to FICON, a mainframe channel developed by IBM that supports data rates of 1 Gbit/s over a fibre connection. The INRANGE IN-VSN FC/9000™ Director (IBM 2042) has successfully completed IBM qualification testing and is now fully supported and resold through IBM for FICON connectivity in IBM’s TotalStorage ESS (Shark) networks.

FICON technology delivers groundbreaking business benefits to its users such as high performance, extended distance and most importantly the best ROI for data infrastructure. Every IT department is under pressure to deliver more and more with less and less resource. FICON improves the speed of data moving within the data centre, a single FICON channel can absorb the workload of several previously used protocols thus capital investment is lower. FICON’s high performance helps meet the needs of evolving workloads, allows offsite backup for risk management and allows remote storage for business continuance in case of disaster. As the business expands and data storage requirements grow the FC/9000 Director has the ability to scale thus meeting business requirements, this means that users only have to invest in what is needed now and they can “pay as they grow”.

FICON support for the FC/9000 is the latest milestone in INRANGE’s business relationship with IBM, in which IBM remarkets and services both the 64 and the 128 port versions of INRANGE’s Directors to open systems and FICON markets. The FC/9000 was the first Director to provide both Fibre Channel and FICON support in a 64 port platform. It can now be installed as the 64 and the 128 port switching infrastructure for FICON storage networks making the FC/9000 the most scaleable Director platform available today for building a storage network with FICON mainframe or open systems Fibre Channel connectivity.

The FC/9000 is the only large-scale Director (128 port) to support IBM’s FICON Server Management (CUP) tools that allow for automated control of both FICON and ESCON devices from a single console. This combination of multi-protocol support, scalability and tight software integration helps customers to simplify daily management operations and to control expenses.

FICON, rapidly becoming a storage networking reality, is a new high performance I/O channel solution optimised for efficiency at high speed. At the same time, it provides IT users with investment protection, system balance and coexistence with today’s parallel ESCON technologies.

This new joint marketing venture builds on INRANGE’s proven record of delivering industry leading support and market vision to enterprise users looking to reap the productivity and management benefits of FICON. There are currently over a million ESCON ports installed worldwide, which provide a significant ESCON to FICON migration base. The FICON architecture provides for numerous benefits over ESCON such as delivering over six times the maximum bandwidth. It also supports up to 16 times more devices per channel and will deliver high performance for connected devices at distances up to 100 kilometres, thus providing customers with more flexible business continuance options.

“With over 30 years of experience in the realm of data storage, INRANGE is well placed to meet the demands of network convergence both now and in the future” stated Salim Mehta, Technical Director, EMEA of INRANGE. “With the ability to offer a complete solution for edge to core to anywhere connectivity, INRANGE has the skills necessary to solve even the most difficult data networking problems.
Trademarks

INRANGE, the INRANGE logo, and the CD/9000 are registered trademarks of INRANGE Technologies Corporation. IN-VSN, FC/9000, and The Storage Networking Company are trademarks of INRANGE Technologies Corporation. All other trademarks and product names are the property of their respective owners.

IBM, FlashCopy and TotalStorage are registered trademarks of International
Business Machines Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other
company, product or service names may be the trademarks or service marks of
others.

About IBM
IBM is the world leader in storage systems, software, services and technology. The recipient of the National Medal of Technology for its contributions to hard disk drive and storage technology, IBM led all companies once again with over 400 storage patents in 2000. IBM invented the magnetic hard disk drive in the mid-1950s and is responsible for nearly every major breakthrough in disk storage technology since then. IBM's open storage solutions are designed for the rigors of e-business collaboration utilizing next generation concepts for open storage by integrating modular technologies including disk, tape and optical storage media, powerful processors, and rich software. For more information about IBM storage, visit http://www.ibm.com/storage.

About INRANGE
INRANGE Technologies Corporation (Nasdaq: INRG), a subsidiary of SPX Corporation, provides large-scale, mission critical storage networking products, software and services - the IN-VSN offering - which provides "end-to-end, any distance - anywhere" solutions.
http://www.inrange.com/


For further information, please contact:
Ian Jarrett, Technical Publicity
Tel: 01582 450054, fax: 01582 878877, e-mail: mailto:ijarrett@technical-publicity.com

Kam Sall, INRANGE Technologies Ltd.
Tel: 01628 822244, fax: 01628 822640, e-mail: mailto:kam.sall@inrange.com