January 27, 2005 Milpitas, CA -- LightSand, provider of storage connectivity products, has introduced the S-8100 SAN Gateway series for small to medium-sized businesses. These new gateways support interconnection of Fibre Channel and FICON storage systems over existing fiber-optic infrastructure across a campus, metropolitan area, or nationwide.
"Organizations of all sizes are recognizing the need to establish effective business continuity and disaster recovery programs," notes LightSand CEO Richard Czech. "We developed the S-8100 series in order to enable organizations with smaller bandwidth capacity to implement cost-effective, high-performance solutions for these critical functions. Our new gateway operates over SONET OC-3/OC-12 or SDH STM-1/STM4 circuits, providing guaranteed performance and minimal, predictable latency."
According to LightSand, its S-8100B 8-port SAN extension gateway is especially suited for use in a data center infrastructure. It provides up to seven Fibre Channel and Layer 2 Ethernet interfaces for local network connections, and up to four SONET/SDH wide area extension interfaces with configurable bandwidths. The S-8100B also provides transparent bridging for geographically distributed SANs over SONET/SDH networks for applications that include data replication and migration, disaster recovery, remote access, business continuity, and asset management.
The S-8100B's proprietary Trunking mechanism allows connection of up to seven concurrently operating SAN fabrics over a single wide area connection. The S-8100B can also be configured for redundant WAN connections, allowing load balancing and failover protection. The S-8100B supports SAN extension for campus, metro, regional, or national distances.
The LightSand S-8100A, an 8-port switching gateway, features local data switching, SAN-to-SAN isolation (routing between FC fabrics), and up to four SONET/SDH extension tunnels for connecting remote sites in the same box. According to the company, the S-8100A brings scalability, isolation, and wide area connectivity to FC networks. When two SANs are merged using a traditional connection over the WAN, the two FC fabrics will become one. This approach, which might be adequate in a small local environment, can lead to scalability and management problems when multiple remote sites and a greater number of FC switches participate in the fabric.
The LightSand S-8100A allows multiple SAN fabrics to be interconnected without merging the fabrics. Storage devices can be shared between sites, while the SAN fabrics operate independently.
The LightSand S-8100F allows interconnection of FICON devices in a mainframe environment and transfer of Ethernet metadata directly over existing WAN infrastructure. No longer are expensive FICON directors necessary to provide FICON extension over the WAN, contends the company. The S-8100F overcomes standard FICON distance limitations. In addition, its unique Trunking mechanism allows the use of a single WAN connection for maintaining up to seven FICON channels. When multiple SONET/SDH interfaces are installed, each FICON input can be directed through a separate WAN interface, providing optimal data traffic distribution.
The S-8100B, S-8100A, and S-8100F support connections over dark fiber (up to 80 km), metropolitan CWDM or DWDM lambda, and SONET/SDH networks using OC-3/STM-1 or OC-12/STM-4 lines (up to 40,000 km).