McDATA introduces FICON support for 6000 series director that can be used on IBM Enterprise Storage Server networks

"McDATA's Director class switch is a proven technology that has been installed in major accounts for more than two years," said Bill North, IDC Director of Research for Storage Software. "Integrating FICON and Fibre Channel traffic through a single storage area network delivers greater usability, easier management, and lower total cost of ownership to end-users."

ESCON, the original storage networking technology developed for the mainframe environment by IBM in the early 1990s, is a highly successful technology that is installed in the majority of the world's data centers. Fibre Channel is the dominant technology used today in storage networks for open systems, including UNIX and NT. FICON is the next generation of storage networking and is based on standard Fibre Channel network components, with McDATA's 6000 Series Director at the core. By selecting a McDATA Director at the core of a storage network, customers can for the first time use the same McDATA Director product and fabric management software in both mainframes and open SANs used by UNIX and Windows.

Both mainframe and open systems environments can use the same product, McDATA's 6000 Series Director: ED-6064. That common architecture enables customers to use the same hardware platform and expect the same management capabilities for both mainframe and open systems requirements. Using common products means lower costs and higher investment protection to the customer.

IBM is the first storage vendor to offer mainframe customers a FICON connection to their high-end disk systems with a standards-based system for data delivery. McDATA's 6000 Series Director is at the core of IBM's FICON storage network, which provides peak data transfer rates nearly six-times faster than the current ESCON technology.

FICON support for the ED-6064 continues the eight-year partnership between IBM and McDATA that began in 1993 with ESCON, expanded into a reseller relationship for open systems Fibre Channel, then advanced to the development of FICON, and now includes support for McDATA's Director on ESS.

"Our customers can now implement a common open standards-based Fibre Channel infrastructure which can potentially lower costs, simplify management and expand investment protection. This is a major milestone in our strategic business alliance with McDATA," said Barry Rudolph, IBM vice president, disk storage systems and software. "The availability of end-to-end solutions combining IBM zSeries servers, IBM pSeries and xSeries servers, McDATA Enterprise Fibre Channel Directors with the IBM Enterprise Storage Server (ESS) is a significant technical achievement."

This common SAN architecture eases the management of storage networks by requiring fewer connections to transport the same amount of information -- fewer connections are less expensive and easier to manage. Customers will also see a dramatic simplification of their fabric due to the transition from multiple ESCON channels onto a single FICON channel.

FICON also enhances network performance over long distance connections. Where ESCON performance significantly decreases over a distance of nine kilometers, FICON channel performance degradation does not occur until 100 kilometers. This gives the customer the benefit of extended distance from a FICON channel.