McData Swings Switches Lower

McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA) is delivering the industry's lowest-end Fibre Channel switch with the Sphereon 4300, which provides between four and 12 ports and is priced as low as $550 per port.

To date, such "starter SAN" offerings have been, to put it mildly, nonstarters. QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq: QLGC), for example, has not had much luck with its own entry-level SAN bundle. But McData believes the timing is right for a low-cost, no-fuss Fibre Channel switch that has the ability to scale with a customer's storage environment.

Mike Tomky, senior product marketing manager for Sphereon, says McData and its storage OEMs have identified a key opportunity for entry-level SANs in small and medium-sized enterprises, which mainly use direct-attached storage (DAS) today.

Specifically, he says customers that are buying midrange storage systems, including the EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) Clariion CX200 and the Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Thunder 9500 V, are becoming more receptive to deploying SANs (see Report: Midmarket Moving to SANs).

"Everybody is going after the midrange market and scaling down in it," he says.Tomky also notes that McData has OEM deals with most of the major storage suppliers. "QLogic hasn't been real successful at penetrating all the OEMs. And part of it is timing -- all the storage and systems vendors have redoubled their efforts in the SME [small and medium enterprise] market."

The Sphereon 4300 is built on the same architecture as McData's highly successful midrange 4500 eight- to 24-port FC switch. The 4300 uses the same single-chip design and provides the same FlexPort module options to let users nondisruptively upgrade in four-port increments (see McData Intros Low-End FC Switch and McData Picks Brocade's Pocket).

But why did McData make four ports the baseline configuration? After all, as Tomky concedes, the typical low-end SAN is between 10 and 12 ports. He says the company was attempting to puncture the perception that SANs are not affordable: The 4300 carries a list price of $5,400 for four ports; in a 12-port configuration, the switch is $6,600, or $550 per port. The pricing includes optics and SANpilot management software.

"The feedback we have from the field and our partners is that four ports makes sense as a way to introduce the concept of SANs without introducing sticker shock," Tomky says. But even at $550 per port, Fibre Channel is nowhere near being in the same ballpark as Ethernet equipment -- and McData and its partners will most likely still find resistance on the price issue.

Also today, McData announced that it has merged the functionalities of its SAN management software packages. With the release of SANavigator 4.0 and Enterprise Fabric Connectivity Management (EFCM) 8.0, both packages now share the same code base. McData will continue to offer EFCM through its OEMs as "the best way to manage McData fabrics," Tomky says, adding that SANavigator will be a better option for heterogeneous SAN management.Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch

A detailed examination of the SAN switch segment is available in the current Byte and Switch Insider report -- "Fibre Channel Market Update" -- which is available here