Finisar and NEC join for SANs

APRIL 12, 2007 -- Finisar Corp. (search for Finisar) has entered a strategic partnership with NEC Corp. of America (NECAM; search for NEC) that the companies say will improve SAN infrastructure reliability for mutual customers. NECAM will integrate Finisar's high-density (HD) fiber-optic traffic access points (TAPs) and NetWisdom Enterprise Solution into its S-Series storage systems offerings. The goal is to help enterprise customers overcome "Fabric Blindness" -- the inability to understand the physical layer transactions and the complex interactions between physical SAN elements.

NEC's S-Series storage systems are designed to deliver exceptional performance, business continuity, high availability, reliability, and scalability that meet rapidly evolving business needs. To extend these same benefits to the entire SAN, NECAM will offer Finisar's technology to deliver visibility into SAN fabrics to ensure that the entire fabric is healthy and performing optimally. This insight can help to resolve many issues before they result in application brownouts or outages, the companies say. Additionally, NECAM has named Finisar as its on-call professional services partner to be dispatched in the event NECAM clients experience issues with their SAN infrastructures.

"Both Finisar and NECAM are dedicated to ensuring uninterrupted data access and application availability in storage networks," said Dave Buse, senior vice president and general manager of network tools, Finisar. "This partnership demonstrates our combined commitment to provide critical visibility into network fabrics and give IT administrators the tools they need to confidently implement effective and proactive SAN management."

"NEC is dedicated to safeguarding our customers by providing them with complete solutions that go beyond storage systems," says Matthew Wolken, vice president of fault tolerant servers and enterprise storage, NECAM. "With Finisar's HD TAP and NetWisdom SAN Availability Solution in place, issues can be identified seamlessly without the traditional, disruptive exploration usually associated with diagnosing potential network impairments."

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