Storage networking equipment
Silver Award:
QLogic SANbox 9000
For companies that don't need a $250,000 director switch, QLogic Corp.'s SANbox 9000 switch, with a starting price of less than $51,000, is designed exclusively for open-systems environments. It can scale to 128 ports in a single 4u chassis, and accommodate any mix of 4Gb/sec or 10Gb/sec Fibre Channel I/O blades. In the opinion of our judges, the SANbox 9000 brings director-switch class features to data centers that previously didn't have the budget for such technology.
Depending on how the SANbox 9000 is configured, it can be deployed in local, campus and remote core/edge topologies. The SANbox 9000 supports up to 256 ports in a dual-chassis configuration. For high availability, it features redundant, hot-swap I/O, CPU, power supply and fan blades. For comprehensive fabric management, the SANbox 9000 includes the easy-to-use Enterprise Fabric Suite 2007 for setting up, monitoring, tuning, troubleshooting and servicing.
In sum, "If you want to start small and grow quickly, the [SANbox] 9000 is a good place to start," says one judge.