IBM Introduces Fully Enabled 4Gb SAN Solutions

HostReview.com
Thursday, September 29, 2005; 08:57 AM

IBM (www.ibm.com) announced the availability of the industry's first fully enabled four gigabit per second (4Gb) Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions for blade servers.

Developed with BladeCenter Alliance partners QLogic and McDATA, IBM's blade offering now offers customers new levels of price, performance and flexibility to help them manage their total IT infrastructure and build stronger on demand business environments.

The new IBM BladeCenter 4Gb offering features the QLogic Fibre Channel host bus adapter, the QLogic 4Gb switch module and McDATA 4Gb switch module.

"IBM BladeCenter continues to set the industry agenda, bringing to market the first fully enabled 4Gb SAN solutions for blade servers. Our chassis expands to 4Gb, bringing investment protection to our new and existing customers," said Doug Balog, vice president and business line executive, IBM BladeCenter.

Previously first-to-market with embedded Fibre Channel switching for blade servers with switch modules developed by QLogic and McDATA, today's announcement further expands IBM's portfolio of embedded SAN switches.

"McDATA is committed to delivering optimized and high performance solutions for customers and meeting their SAN infrastructure needs as they deploy new applications using IBM's BladeCenter," said Doug Ingraham, vice president of product management, McDATA.

"BladeCenter offers the only fully enabled 4Gb solution for blade servers. Today's new offerings provide customers with products that can help them deploy a tiered storage architecture for always-on access to information," said Frank Berry, vice president of marketing, QLogic Corporation.

IBM BladeCenter has the industry's broadest blade ecosystem, offering networking, storage and software technology from numerous other industry leaders including Brocade, Cisco Systems and Nortel, as part of more than 600 BladeCenter Alliance and Open Specification program partners.