Hewlett-Packard Co. made two product announcements yesterday which it says will provide greater flexibility for customers building storage area networks (SANs) made up of multiple servers located at distributed sites.
A SAN is a specialized type of network in which data moves quickly and reliably between servers and other storage resources. Including multiple servers that contain the same or similar data in a network allows a business to take advantage of disaster-recovery and high-availability capabilities which help keep the network running in the event that a server crashes.
HP said the hubs it makes to connect servers in Fibre Channel-based SANs can now be spaced up to 10 kilometers (about 6.2 miles) apart, allowing customers to link servers situated on either side of a campus, or even spanning a metropolitan area.
To make it easier to monitor the health of those expanded networks, HP also announced HP Fibre Channel Manager, a Web-based network management software that allows companies to remotely keep tabs on the status of hubs in a Fibre Channel network.
Fibre Channel is a 1G-bit/sec network interface technology used to link multiple servers together in a SAN.
Previously, HP's long-wave Fibre Channel hubs could be spaced only three kilometers apart, effectively limiting customers to connecting servers in adjacent buildings, said Phil Kemp, product marketing manager for Fibre Channel with HP's Enterprise Strategic Solutions group.
The 10 kilometer networking capabilities are available immediately to HP's existing Fibre Channel customers whose cabling plants meet certain minimum specifications documented on HP's Web site, Kemp said.
Ten kilometers is the maximum distance supported by the current Fibre Channel specification -- an open standard as defined by the American National Standards Institute -- and no immediate plans are underway to revise that specification, Kemp said.
Fibre Channel Manager's capabilities include proactive environmental monitoring of the Fibre Channel hub's infrastructure elements, including the fan, power supply and temperature gauge; detecting which hub ports are in use, and bypassing or enabling hub ports from the management workstation, HP said.
RELATED LINKS
Fibre Channel White Paper
Transoft overview of the technology.
Download Fibre Channel Manager
From HP.
IBM to tout Fibre Channel server options
Network World, 4/13/98.
Storage decision is no longer open and shut
Musthaler on fibre channel. Network World, 1/19/98.
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