New SANcastle Feature Enables an Industry First

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SANcastle Technologies, Inc. today announced the availability of its latest feature: Autonomous Regions with Domain Address Translation (AR/DAT), which resolves global SAN scalability and simplifies large Fibre Channel fabrics for storage administrators.

AR/DAT enables an industry first — a Fibre Channel Native Firewall. SANcastle switches with AR/DAT, act as “border switches” eliminating address conflicts between domains (switches) and improving management and control between Autonomous Regions for security and performance. The SAN islands are connected to core switches via FC SW2 E-Port standard, thereby eliminating vendor interoperability issues.

SANcastle’s border switches with AR/DAT interconnect heterogeneous, local or remote SAN islands into single, homogeneous Fibre Channel fabrics, keeping intact the mutually independent domain address spaces and zoning strategies of each individual fabric. When one island is disrupted due to planned or unplanned downtime, the disruption no longer affects the entire fabric. AR/DAT fully eliminates the penetration of undesired Registered State Change Notifications (RSCNs) from one Fibre Channel fabric to the other, thereby eliminating the propagation of disruptions beyond the individual SAN borders.

AR/DAT gives users the ability to improve security, performance, and manageability of their existing SANs that are fibre channel based, as well as those that are remotely tied together. This means that enterprises that have already implemented Fibre Channel based SANs within their enterprise can optimize the investment already spent with little or no disruption to the existing Fibre Channel fabrics.

“There is plenty of talk in the industry right now about the mega-switches that will enable SANs to infinitely scale, but there is a very real need for a solution that addresses the scaling issue in existing SAN infrastructures,” stated Nancy Marrone, senior analyst with The Enterprise Storage Group. “SANcastle’s AR/DAT solution is the first in the industry to provide the ability to isolate SAN domains and ease the management burdens in a complex SAN environment.”

“SANcastle’s border switches with AR/DAT represent a member of the new SAN building block in the march towards global SAN and the holy grail of the storage utility,” says Steve Sicola, technical director for HP’s Online Storage Division, “The AR/DAT feature makes it part of the ‘Storage Router’ family, as I call it — those components that mesh the fabrics together, thereby making scale possible without the nightmares of tight coupling across sites or businesses, not to mention interoperability between switch types.”

“Consolidating multiple storage networks into one integrated fabric is an important means for enterprises to control storage management costs,” stated Farid Neema, president of Peripheral Concepts, Inc. and chairman of the Network Storage Conference. “This is one of the important topics addressed at Network Storage 2002. SANcastle has been pioneering this field and I am delighted to have them share with us their approach to integrating a set of heterogeneous SAN islands into a seamless, homogeneous network.”

“With AR/DAT, SANcastle is demonstrating that we offer more than a ‘SAN extension’ solution and that we are committed to being the leader in the border switch market,” stated Jim Keady, president and chief executive officer, SANcastle. “AR/DAT also provides the flexibility of supporting different brands of Fibre Channel switches and directors — true interoperability that users have been demanding.”

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