EMC has finally qualified McData’s flagship backbone director, more than a year after McData first launched the Intrepid 10000 (i10k).
The long qualification process led some analysts to believe that EMC might once again be squeezing price concessions from its offspring.
McData has been locked in a battle with Cisco for supremacy in the high-end Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) switch market. The long-awaited EMC qualification could give McData a much-needed boost in that battle.
EMC, which resells switches from McData, Cisco and Brocade under its Connectrix program, will sell the i10k as the EMC Connectrix ED-10000M backbone director.
Asked about the long qualification process, an EMC spokesperson said, “The Connectrix ED-10000M from EMC is high-performing and reliable and has completed EMC’s rigorous E-Lab testing and qualification process. As you know, we have previously stated publicly that the product would be generally available once it completed that process, which it has. The business relationship between EMC and McData is and has been strong. EMC’s GA of this particular product is the result of it successfully completing testing and qualification.”
In a statement, Doug Ingraham, McData’s vice president of product management, said, “The EMC Connectrix ED-10000M backbone director has gone through extensive testing and qualification to meet the requirements of the most demanding environments. McData and EMC have a long history of delivering a wide range of robust directors and switches that combine investment protection, interoperability and tiered storage networking capabilities that enterprise customers demand in order to consolidate, optimize and protect their data.”
The new Connectrix ED-10000M “delivers high levels of flexibility to enterprise SANs, helping customers more effectively build an infrastructure for information lifecycle management (ILM),” EMC said, adding that the director “enables secure consolidation of multiple SANs, optimized tiered storage and data protection via partitioning from server to storage system.”
The Fibre Channel and FICON backbone director offers 256 non-blocking ports, secure fabric and application segmentation and 10Gbps intelligent connectivity, and can handle both open systems and mainframe requirements.