New Products & Services

SAN Switching

Intrepid Director

The 140-port Intrepid 6140 Director is a SAN switching solution for large deployments in a 12 U chassis.

According to McDATA, it delivers 99.999 percent availability. To do this it has hot-plug, redundant power supplies, fans and processors; hot-plug optics and port modules; on-line diagnostics; and HotCAT (for the online load and activation of firmware without disruption). The port speed of the Intrepid 6140 is 2 Gbps in full-duplex mode. It has 60 buffer credits per port and a switch latency average of less than two microseconds.

The solution is compatible with Fibre Channel Protocols such as FC-PH Rev 4.3, FC-PH-2, FC-PH-3, FC-GS-2, FC-FLA, FC-FG, FC-SW-2, Fibre Channel Element MIB (FE-MIB), TCP/IP MIB-II Groups, and Classes of Service Class 2, 3 and F.

The Intrepid Director 6140 supports optical media types including shortwave (500 m/1 Gbps and 300 m/2 Gbps) and longwave (10 km, 20 km 30 km and 35 km / 2 Gbps). The switch can also support varying cables such as 62.5/125 micron multimode for 300 m, 50/125 micron multimode for 500 m and, 9/125 micron single mode for 10 km.

Contact:
McDATA Technology Systems
Tel: (65) 6398 8661
Fax: (65) 6398 8715
Website: www.mcdata.com

SAN for SMBs

Thunder 9520V

The Thunder 9520V from Hitachi Data Systems is a high-availability storage system for SMBs. This disk array delivers 4.2 Gbps of cached bandwidth—what HDS claims is six times that of a comparative ATA-based product. The 9250V supports enhanced SATA Data Protection. Hi-Track 24/7 'call home' technology helps diagnose and resolve issues. The fully redundant components can be replaced without downtime.

The raw capacity of the product is 13 TB; its capacity is 6.5 TB with RAID-1 (mirroring) and 12.1 TB with RAID-5. The maximum cache size per system is 2 GB. It supports a maximum of 512 LUNs.

It supports many server operating systems including Windows NT, Solaris and HP-UX. A Resource Manager application is included. Optionally users can avail of software such as the ShadowImage In-System Replication and Copy-on-Write snapshot.

Hitachi Data Systems is offering SAN Starter Solutions with pre-configured storage systems and components to capture companies deploying a SAN for the first time.

Contact
Hitachi Data Systems India Private Limited.
Tel: (080) 22088307 / 08
Fax: (080) 22088309
Website: www.hds.com

IP SAN

Intransa IP7500

The Intransa IP7500 is the first offering from Intransa that is built upon its IntraStor modular storage architecture with StorControl software.

Designed from the ground up to leverage a company's existing Ethernet infrastructure, the IP7500 combines TCP/IP and standard ATA disk drives to provide an alternative to Fibre Channel for some applications. The IP7500 is a pre-configured full-rack system, with 24 TB of capacity, a UPS, preloaded software, a management station, and headroom for expansion. It accepts 20 redundant Gigabit Ethernet connections (40 without redundancy).

StorControl software is used to consolidate storage resources into a virtualised pool, ensuring continuous data availability and protection.

The IP7500 delivers N-way active-active failover with redundant front-end and back-end switching that eliminates single points of failure. The IP7500 comes with 24 TB and is expandable to 32 TB in the same rack with the addition of modular building-block disk enclosures. The fully-integrated solution also forms the rack-level building block for large-scale enterprise IP SAN deployments with hundreds of terabytes.

The Intransa IP7500 is targeted at business-critical online applications—digital media, video surveillance, data warehousing or mining, and near-line storage.

Contact
Intransa, Inc.
Tel: (080) 51216439
Fax: (080) 51104357
Website: www.intransa.com

Disk-based backup

REO 4000

The REO 4000 disk-based backup and recovery product from Overland Storage is a pre-configured system incorporating high-capacity, serial ATA disks, specialised software, connectivity for iSCSI and Fibre Channel, and RAID 5. When integrated with a tape automation solution such as Overland's NEO SERIES of tape libraries, the REO 4000 provides a comprehensive disk-to-disk-to-tape solution.

The device is qualified for use with the VERITAS NetBackup 5.0 Enterprise Server and VERITAS NetBackup 5.0 Server. The appliance can host up to 64 virtual tape drives while providing the performance and data protection of a RAID 5 disk array. In virtual tape mode, the REO 4000 writes data to disks in LTO-2 tape format.

It supports the Solaris or Windows-based storage area networks of organisations that run VERITAS software using Fibre Channel. The product can be configured to operate as a tape device, a disk device, or any combination of 64 tape and disk devices.

Contact
Overland Storage
Tel: (0) 9849 790109
Fax: (040) 2711 7099
Website:www.overlandstorage.com

Database

Oracle 10g Release 2

Oracle has released a new version of its flagship database. 10g Release 2 adds new sorting techniques such as index creation to improve the performance of sorting operations, and it may well eliminate the need for pre-load sort operations. The improved load balancing in Oracle Real Application Clusters enables rapid response to changing server utilisation patterns across a cluster.

Oracle has also advanced its availability competencies. The new release features an open Application Programme Interface (API) for Oracle's clusterware-Cluster Ready Services-that will facilitate higher application availability. New backup and recovery capabilities in 10g Release 2 enhance existing backup-to-disk operations by automating the tape backup process, reducing the need for complex backup environments. Its automated fail-over capabilities improve a site's ability to resume online services rapidly after a disaster, even in unattended environments.

10g Release 2 builds upon the manageability features of its predecessor. The new release is said to feature improved Automatic Storage Management (ASM) with enhanced storage virtualisation. Among other things, ASM simplifies the optimal configuration and management of database storage in an enterprise grid environment.

10g Release 2 allows for greater awareness of overall system performance by means of the Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor. The Automatic Workload Repository generates comparison reports that provide a mechanism for quick troubleshooting of performance bottlenecks.

Contact
Oracle India Private Limited
Tel: (0124) 2549250
Fax: (0124) 2549270
Website: www.oracle.com

Secure switches

Cisco Add-ons

The Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 4500 Series supervisor engines (with enhanced security, availability and integrated 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and GbE uplinks), the Cisco Catalyst 6500, 3750 and 3560 10/100/1000 Power Over Ethernet (PoE) products are new to Cisco’s Catalyst product family.

The Cisco Catalyst 6500 Supervisor Engine 32, with Policy Feature Card 3B, extends core innovations to the edge of the network. Based on the Catalyst 6500 Supervisor Engine 720, the Catalyst 6500 Supervisor Engine 32 allows customers to deploy hardware-based security features such as DoS mitigation to protect network application performance. It also has scaleable support for application multicasting.

Designed to increase network and application availability, new Cisco IOS availability innovations include Layer 3 Non-Stop Forwarding with Stateful Switch Over (NSF/SSO) on the Cisco Catalyst 6500, and Layer 2 SSO on the Cisco Catalyst 6500 and Cisco Catalyst 4500. These enhancements promise to enable sub-second failover capabilities for continuity of mission-critical services such as IP Telephony.

The new Generic Online Diagnostics (GOLD) feature of the Cisco Catalyst 6500 series proactively detects and addresses potential faults in a switch before they affect network traffic and switch availability.

Building on its 10GbE market, the Cisco Catalyst switch portfolio is extending 10GbE support to the edge of the network in its modular switches. The new Cisco Catalyst 6500 Supervisor Engine 32 is offered with a choice of two 10 GbE XENPAK-based or eight 1 GbE Small Form Factor Pluggable (SFP)-based uplinks.

Contact
Cisco System (I) Pvt. Ltd
Tel: (080) 51033226
Fax: (080) 22237650
Website: www.cisco.com

Cabling solution

Systimax 10GE

Systimax Solutions has launched a cabling solution capable of supporting 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The company believes it is the first vendor to provide a full UTP solution that fully complies with the latest IEEE 802.3an task force guidelines for 10GBASE-T. It is called the Systimax GigaSPEED X10D Solution.

This solution is a natural extension of existing Category 6/Class E specifications. The GigaSPEED X10D Solution is covered under the Systimax SCS 20-year Extended Product Warranty and Application Assurance.

Systimax Labs used the Modal Decomposition Modelling tool to evaluate the 1,024 interactions between adjacent, as well as within, cabling components to achieve what it says is a substantial reduction in alien crosstalk (ANEXT or noise from adjacent cables and connectors).

GigaSPEED 91 Series Cable is available in plenum, non-plenum and low-smoke, zero-halogen versions.

Contact
Systimax Solutions
Tel: (080) 5112 4041
Fax: (080) 5112 4049
Website: www.systimax.com