Features - Storage Innovations:

McDATA UNVEILS ECLIPSE 2640 SAN ROUTER

McDATA Corp introduced the newest member of its Eclipse family of SAN Routers -- the Eclipse 2640 -- extending unprecedented scalability, distance-connectivity and multi-protocol access to traditional storage area networks.

The new Eclipse 2640 extends McDATA's leadership and innovation in the routing space with products that offer the broadest range of highly available, heterogeneous and multi-protocol support while providing the maximum performance and bandwidth utilization across the enterprise. McDATA's SAN router is unique to the industry as it provides three essential features that drastically improve the asset utilization and performance of a customer's SAN infrastructure.

• Seamless interconnection of multi-vendor and multi-protocol SAN islands.
• Advanced traffic shaping, bandwidth management, protocol termination and data compression for high performance over any distance.
• True SAN routing with proven, reliable and secure address translation, fault isolation and network segmentation capabilities.

"The market is realizing that affordable SAN routing is a simple, economical solution that meets data protection, long-distance connectivity and data availability needs," said Randy Kerns of The Evaluator Group. "McDATA continues to expand on its first to market SAN Routing technology and iSCSI-capable product line with the new Eclipse 2640, which will offer customers economical solutions for access to their business-critical data."

McDATA's Eclipse 2640 SAN Router delivers a cost-effective platform for extending connectivity, replication and backup applications throughout the enterprise, enabling greater data protection and reduced cost of ownership through increased storage consolidation and asset sharing.

"As companies consolidate storage and server assets across the enterprise, they require reliable and scalable SAN routing solutions that can help them better manage connectivity across heterogeneous environments and long distances," said Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems research at IDC. "Products like McDATA's Eclipse 2640 SAN Router will help IT managers deploy more cost-effective, robust and flexible storage solutions for tiered storage and enhanced business continuity."

McDATA's Eclipse 2640 offers wire-speed fast-write, compression and protocol termination to deliver the highest performance and cost-effective bandwidth utilization and IP protocol conversion. Using McDATA's Eclipse 2640, customers can efficiently leverage existing IP network resources and ensure reliable connectivity across disparate SAN islands in a much simpler and cost-effective manner, reducing their time to deployment and overall Total Cost of Ownership.

"We believe that McDATA will not only leverage iFCP's capabilities to great advantage over its competitors FCIP-based products, but will build upon them as well in addition to its Fibre Channel SAN interconnection capabilities," said John Webster of Data Mobility Group. "These capabilities are exemplified in McDATA's new Eclipse 2640 SAN Router."

The Eclipse 2640 SAN Router is the only router offering twelve 2Gbps Fibre Channel ports, four Ethernet ports and a comprehensive set of intelligent network and performance services.

"McDATA has integrated the most advanced and proven technology into this product providing a secure, optimized solution for storage over distance, SAN routing and iSCSI storage applications," said Peter Dougherty, vice president of switch platforms at McDATA. "Last year when we announced the Eclipse 1620 we disclosed our vision to accelerate the migration to real-time information access. The Eclipse 2640 is continuing down this path, connecting and consolidating heterogeneous SANs across the globe with greater levels of interoperability while assuring our customers maximum value of their data anywhere in the enterprise."