InformationWeek

February 22, 1999

Storage Shift For IBM

New products based on Fibre Channel

By Eileen Colkin with Martin J. Garvey

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fter years of remaining loyal to SSA interconnect technology, IBM last week embraced storage area networks based on Fibre Channel, with the release of several products under its SAN initiative.

The Fibre Channel RAID Storage Server is its first device to include Fibre Channel drives that can attach to small clusters of Unix or Windows NT servers if all servers in the cluster are the same. Capacity ranges from 18 Gbytes to 1 terabyte, and pricing ranges from 20 cents to 50 cents per Mbyte, depending on configuration.

IBM also released its Fibre Channel Storage Hub system, with seven ports to support up to 100-Mbytes-per-second data transmission between system servers and storage servers. The company's new SAN Data Gateway connects SCSI- and Ultra SCSI-attached disk and tape storage systems to select Unix and NT servers that support the Fibre Channel interconnect. IBM wouldn't disclose pricing for the products.

On the software side, IBM upgraded its StorWatch centralized management tool, which lets network administrators monitor and dynamically reconfigure multiple RAID Storage systems from a single Windows 95 or NT workstation to support Fibre Channel.

While IBM wouldn't specify delivery dates, it says more Fibre Channel SAN offerings are on the way.