With iSCSI only storage support
Another vendor got into the unified data center ‘schtick’ last week, adding to the pool of other vendors such as Brocade, Cisco and Dell, who are trying to appeal to the data center market with end-to-end system and storage solutions.
Enterasys looks to head off Cisco, Brocade data center plans
Enterasys last Monday rolled out upgraded data center switches and a new data center strategy. New to the company’s S-Series switches is the ability to recognize changes to virtual machines and automatically adjust network policies, service-level agreements and bandwidth. The switches can be paired with servers from Dell, HP and IBM and with both VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer environments.
Lacking from Enterasys’ platform is attachment to storage via either Fibre Channel or Fibre Channel over Ethernet, in our minds an essential element for data center consolidation. Enterasys S-Series switches only support iSCSI, a technology the company says it has no trouble having enterprises adopt, but which we find hard to digest what with all the legacy Fibre Channel SANs installed.
Dell too focuses on iSCSI only products with its new EqualLogic PS6000XVS and PS6010XV arrays and its MD3200 and PowerVault MD3200i storage arrays.
Maybe iSCSI is the way to go for small and mid-size businesses, but we’ve seen a bunch of Fibre Channel that needs to be displaced. We also think it is contingent for these vendors – Enterasys and Dell – to recognize that iSCSI isn’t the ‘end all the be all’ for data center convergence and that it isn’t always the first choice among large data center operators.
