McData Speeds Out IP Switch

McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA) today launched a low-end IP storage switch -- developed by the just-acquired Nishan Systems -- that the company claims is up to five times faster than similar devices from its main rival, Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) (see McData Debuts Low-End IP Switch).

Slated to ship in mid-November, McData's Eclipse 1620 provides two 1-Gbit/s Fibre Channel ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and supports iSCSI and Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP) (see McData Sticking With iFCP). The product is intended to be used to connect SANs in remote offices for disaster recovery applications, as well as to act as a local iSCSI-to-Fibre Channel gateway to allow as many as 40 servers access to SAN-attached storage.

The Eclipse 1620 is clearly designed to go head-to-head with Cisco's SN 5428 storage router. But the McData switch is able to process storage traffic much more efficiently than the Cisco gear, particularly at smaller block sizes, says Bill Burger, McData's director of emerging technologies.

"We provide three to five times the performance than [Cisco] for the same price," he says.

The difference, Burger says, is that the 1620 provides hardware-based acceleration to convert IP traffic to Fibre Channel using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip.According to McData, the 1620 supports throughput of 440 Mbyte/s with 16K block sizes, and 353 Mbyte/s with 8K block sizes. That easily outperforms the SN 5428, which Cisco says provides 120 Mbyte/s (60 Mbyte/s on each of its two iSCSI ports). (Meanwhile, Israeli startup Sanrad claims its iSCSI V switches beat either one of them, with maximum throughput of 750 Mbyte/s.)

The 1620 switch was developed by Nishan, the IP storage networking startup that McData finished acquiring last month (see McData Sweeps Up Nishan, Sanera).

In a sign that McData hasn't fully McData-ized the Nishan gear at this point, the 1620 supports Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) FC switches in native mode, but doesn't yet support McData switches natively. To work with McData or other non-Brocade switches, the 1620 must be set to E-port interop mode. Burger says support for McData's native-mode is forthcoming.

McData will offer the 1620 at three price points: With iSCSI only, the company expects the the street price to be around $12,000; with iSCSI and iFCP support, it's $15,000; and with iSCSI, iFCP, and intelligent bandwidth management services it will be between $25,000 and $30,000.

The company says it's in talks with OEMs, distributors, and resellers to carry the product, but has no agreeements to announce yet. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and XIOtech Corp. are among the partners that resell the higher-end IPS 3300 and 4300 switches developed by Nishan.Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch