24 September 2003 Broomfield, CO, and Mahwah, NJ/Munich, Germany Lightwave -- Storage networking provider McDATA Corp. and ADVA Optical Networking have announced that McDATA's Intrepid Directors and Sphereon Fabric Switches have successfully completed testing with ADVA's Fiber Service Platform (FSP) systems. The live testing of numerous storage applications, including Fibre Channel and FICON, was completed at McDATA's Systems Integration Lab in Broomfield, CO, as part of the company's OPENready Interoperability Partner Program.
Joint deployment of ADVA FSP systems and McDATA's multi-capable switching solutions address multi-site business continuity, disaster recovery, remote storage access, and similar storage applications in metro areas for medium- and large-size enterprises. Growing awareness of the benefits of distributed storage connectivity has resulted in an increasing number of comprehensive storage solutions amongst enterprises. Deployment of these multi-vendor storage solutions mandates closer alliance partnerships between vendors and the formation of more strategic partner programs, such as McDATA's OPENready Solutions Partner program and ADVA's ADVAntage Qualification Program.
"By partnering with ADVA, McDATA's industry-leading storage networking solutions can be extended over long distances in a low cost, easy to implement manner," contends Mark Stratton, director of solutions marketing, McDATA.
"Storage connectivity is one of the most important applications for enterprise and carrier networks today," notes Brian P. McCann, ADVA's chief marketing and strategy officer. "Metro optical networking solutions enable native 1- and 2-Gbit/sec Fibre Channel services with full bandwidth throughput for the same price of a T3/E3 service, making storage-over-optical extremely flexible and cost-effective for enterprises of any size."
McDATA's OPENready Solutions Partner program was developed specifically to address market demand for joint solutions from McDATA and key interoperability partners, requiring a robust test plan executed in McDATA's Systems Integration Lab. Solution Partner testing goes beyond basic connectivity by emulating, as closely as possible, real world environments that can benefit from storage networking technology.
ADVA's FSP product portfolio supports Ethernet, storage, and wavelength solutions for customer premise, metro access, metro core, and regional networks. Targeted toward both enterprises and carriers, the parallel use of C/DWDM and TDM technology enables all protocols between 8 Mbits/sec and 10Gbits/sec and up to 512 applications to be transported over one single fiber pair. The FSP system design supports point-to-point, linear add/drop, ring, and meshed network topologies with up to ten nodes across distances up to 500 kilometers without regeneration.