IBM Offers Fast SAN

IBM has announced the availability of the new IBM Blade Center 4Gb, the industry's first fully enabled 4-gigabit-per-second Storage Area Network solution for blade servers.

The offering, announced Wednesday at Storage Decisions 2005 in New York City, is expected to improve performance, increase flexibility and assist in the management of total IT infrastructure.

It features the QLogic Fibre Channel host bus adapter, the QLogic 4Gb switch module and the McData 4Gb switch module. When coupled with IBM's Total Storage DS4800, it provides a high performance, scalable, reduced-cost SAN solution. Switch modules are available in 10 and 20 port models, and upgrades are available through software keys.

The system is expected to ease installation, configuration and arrangement of SAN infrastructure, deliver configuration zoning and extended distance wizards to simplify switch installation and fabric scaling, provide non-disruptive code load and activation, and support optional McData security software.

"These offerings with McData and QLogic allow clients to deploy blades in new areas like data warehousing and database serving where high data bandwidth is a requirement," Doug Balog, vice president and business line executive for IBM BladeCenter.

Frank Berry, vice president of marketing for QLogic Corporation said that the offering will allow customers to deploy tiered storage architecture for "always-on access to information."