Gadzoox ships double-speed Fibre Channel switch
Users will be able to retrieve data from storage twice as fast with a Fibre Channel switch Gadzoox Networks is expected to introduce this week, the company says.
Called the Slingshot 4218, the full-fabric switch is installed in the storage-area network between a server and departmental storage devices, and multiplexes requests for data over a SAN without a loss of bandwidth, Gadzoox says.
The storage vendor is one of the first to roll out 2G bit/sec technology in its boxes. Competitor Brocade Communications is expected to enter the market with a 2G bit/sec switch of its own this summer. McData and Vixel will also follow suit.
The 2G bit/sec Fibre Channel devices are designed to add speed to SAN environments struggling to handle streaming video, prepress publishing production and other heavy-duty applications. Data-intensive industries, such as insurance, medical and video/audio production facilities, need the higher speed.
The Slingshot succeeds Gadzoox's Capellix switch, which worked in only Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop environments. It has 18 ports, is rack-mountable and operates at 2G bit/sec or is backward-compatible to 1G bit/sec devices. Slingshots can be used to provide faster performance to a SAN or to create a higher-speed backbone 1G bit/sec devices connect to.
"All of our sounds are digital and on the computer - someone is cutting sounds for a film like 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' or 'Men in Black' at any time -- and the pictures are huge," says Lew Goldstein, sound engineer and IT manager for C5, an audio post-production facility in New York. C5 maintains about 700G bytes of storage.
"We have five feature films going on at any one time, getting digital picture and audio off the network, and the program we use takes in about 20M byte/sec," Goldstein says.
"Even with the 1M-byte bandwidth we achieve from the Capellix switch, the 2G-bit switch will give us twice the throughput and have many less collisions or possibilities of dragging the network down," he adds.
The Slingshot senses the speed of the device connected to it and adjusts on a port-by-port basis to each device. Two additional ports allow switches to be daisy-chained to each other without losing ports. The compact 1.75-inch-high box fits in space-constrained environments.
Priced at less than $1,000 per port, the Slingshot 4218 will be available this summer.
Gadzoox: www.gadzoox.com
Network World
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