QLogic and Storage Area Network (SAN) solution vendor McDATA have begun a new initiative aimed at making it easier for customers to build and maintain global, multivendor blade-server environments. The two companies will work together to enable core-to-edge interoperability, virtual routing, open exchange of management data, zoning, security, and partitioning. The initiative will make seamless interoperability available in native McDATA mode across McDATA's full product suite and QLogic's SANbox switches.
The partnership takes advantage of the trend toward blade computing in the computer industry. "Our research on companies' future spending plans makes it clear that blade servers will play a critical role in enterprises' future data center investments, so providers of SAN switching solutions must ensure compatibility between embedded Fibre Channel switches and existing enterprise SAN solutions," said Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems at market research firm IDC.
The McDATA/QLogic initiative will be the first to bring native-mode interpretability with McDATA products to a switch vendor. McDATA's native mode is based on full compliance with the Fibre Channel Switch Fabric (FC-SW) standards. QLogic is an OEM whose chips and products are in solutions from companies such as Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Network Appliance, Quantum, StorageTek, and Sun Microsystems.
