adzoox Networks Inc., a $5 million storage vendor, last week introd
uced Gibraltar, a Fibre Channel arbitrated loop hub with built-in management capabilities that analysts believe could help introduce the FC-AL architecture to mainstream IS customers. Fibre Channel technology offers data transfer rates of 100 Mbps, and many believe it will soon replace traditional SCSI technology for storage devices.
Gadzoox says it has signed manufacturing agreements for Gibraltar with system vendor Hewlett-Packard and hard-disk drive manufacturer Seagate Technology, and will release a suite of managed FC-AL switches and bridging technology by year's end. Gibraltar, with up to 10 ports, is available now for $500 per port.
Stuart Melnitsky, an analyst with the Yankee Group Inc., a Boston research firm, says Gibraltar may be a way to introduce the FC-AL architecture to the corporate enterprise. "Network managers like to keep an eye on things, and Gibraltar allows them to do topologies and technology mapping," he says.
Gibraltar includes Gadzoox's SNMP-based Ventana management archi
tecture, which provides data center or network managers with network-management and help-desk capabilities to spot such problems as networking bottlenecks. Storage-system monitoring can be done without affecting bandwidth.
Bill Lozoff, marketing director for Gadzoox, says the San Jose, Calif., company's technology lets customers build storage subsystems in a network approach to satisfy demands on capacity. Lozoff says Gibraltar is designed to do for storage subsystems what wiring closets did for LANs. One key difference: FC-AL components can be spread across 10 kilometers.
As fast as Fibre Channel technology is, IS customers will need the motivation of a specific requirement before they begin wholesale replacement of SCSI devices. "Sites aren't just going to rip out their SCSI drives," says Melnitsky, "but if bandwidth is key and they need to upgrade, they'll be willing to look at these technologies."
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adzoox Networks Inc., a $5 million storage vendor, last week introd
uced Gibraltar, a Fibre Channel arbitrated loop hub with built-in management capabilities that analysts believe could help introduce the FC-AL architecture to mainstream IS customers. Fibre Channel technology offers data transfer rates of 100 Mbps, and many believe it will soon replace traditional SCSI technology for storage devices.
