Two big storage system manufacturers have added to their portfolios to help organizations hold the ever-increasing amounts of data from customers.
Cisco Systems Inc. announced the MDS 9710 Multilayer Director, which it says delivers three times the bandwidth of any storage director in the industry, and the MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch, which performs storage networking services in the SAN fabric.
Hewlett-Packard Co. announced the blade-based HP StoreVirtual 4630 Storage, which reduces initial investment and total cost of ownership (TCO) for midrange businesses, along with new HP StoreVirtual 4330 and 4730 storage models with Fibre Channel connectivity.
Cisco said the MDS 9710 Multilayer Director, which can be ordered now, delivers 24 terabits per second of total switching capacity. Its 14RU chassis also supports both high-density Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), with 48-port 16GB Fibre Channel and 48-port 10GB FCoE line cards available.
It includes fully redundant fans, switching fabrics and power supplies.
When the MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch is available the third quarter it can be ordered with up to 40 line-rate ports of 16GB FC/FICON, eight ports of 10 GE FCoE, and two ports of 1/10GE FCIP/iSCSI. Storage services are licenced separately.
HP said the StoreVirtual Storage – based on the HP LeftHand Storage platform – offers scalable and highly available storage for virtualized environments. It comes as a software-only virtual storage appliance Converged Storage Appliance that runs on rack-based or blade-based HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) hardware.
The HP StoreVirtual 4630 Storage has 6 GB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS ) connectivity with 11.25 TB per rack unit capacity, double the density of previous generations. The footprint is 50 per cent smaller than the previous generation, which makes it ideal for mid-sized companies, HP said. The new architecture which lowers energy costs, HP said.
It can scale to 180 TB within the same HP BladeSystem chassis and 720 TB within a management group.
On the StoreVirtual 4330 and 4730 Fibre Channel connectivity has been added to the existing iSCSI 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) support, which HP said increases their flexibility.
It also speed transition to new technologies with simplified migration between Fibre Channel and iSCSI connections, HP said.
HP has also created a new software-defined storage solution that combines the StoreVirtual VSA with the new D2220sb Storage Blade. Integrating a scalable, robust iSCSI SAN within an BladeSystem chassis eliminates customers’ need to purchase external storage hardware to support growing virtualization environments, HP said.
The StoreVirtual 4330 FC, 4730 FC and 4630 Storage models are available immediately with a starting price of US$28,000 for the StoreVirtual 4330 system with Fibre Channel support, $63,000 for the 4730 system with Fibre Channel support and $64,000 for the StoreVirtual 4630 system.
The D2220sb Storage Blade with HP StoreVirtual VSA software is available now and priced at $5,999.
