SILVER: McData Intrepid 6140 Director |
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By SearchStorage.com & Storage magazine editors
06 Jan 2003 | SearchStorage.com and Storage magazine |
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Silver medal: NETWORKING EQUIPMENT
Storage needs are growing at alarming rates, along with the requirement to meet business continuance goals, match SLAs and adapt to changing business needs. The McData Intrepid 6140 Director can handle almost any task thrown its way. Simply put, it's an immense, capable switch built for quickly growing large Fibre Channel (FC) SAN fabrics and mainframe FICON environments.
Because the Intrepid 6140 extends the scalability to 140 ports, it provides less complicated connectivity for large SANs. The Intrepid 6140can scale up from 64 to 140 ports in four-port increments and with its protocol-independent architecture, 60 buffer credits per port, low switch latency and 2Gb/s speed, is designed to support many emerging technologies, such as 10Gb/s, iSCSI, FC over IP, and InfiniBand.
It's nice to see a large port-count switch that can grow with a company's storage requirements -- and grow in a way that protects prior investments. McData's hot code load and activation technology (HotCat) allows new firmware and software to be deployed without network disruption. And because of its high number of ports, cabling and inter-switch connections are simplified, which reduces costs. The judges liked the McData Intrepid 6140 director because it was designed to meet a company's storage needs today, and most importantly, can scale to tomorrow's needs as well.
Networking equipment runner-up
Bronze: Emulex LightPulse LP9802 HBA
Back to complete listing of winners
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