Crossroads Unveils First Disk-Based Product, Plus New iSCSI Solutions

Crossroads showed its iBOD, an iSCSI-to-SCSI router with up to 2 Tbytes of raw hard-drive capacity in a 1U rack-mount enclosure, said Bob Griswold, chief technologist and senior director of the Austin, Texas-based company.

IBOD has hot-swappable drives, and SCSI tape or disk drives can be connected for additional capacity or for use in data backups, Griswold said. It offers LUN (Logical Unit Number) zoning, which allows applications running under Windows NT to securely share the drives, he said.

The iSCSI side of the iBOD can be connected to an iSCSI controller in a server, or to an iSCSI switch to make it part of a complete iSCSI-based SAN, said Griswold.

The new iBOD should be of interest to solution providers offering networked storage to small and midsize businesses, Griswold said. "Unlike Fibre Channel, where the cost of the implementation drives users to add more storage, solution providers can use iSCSI to help smaller customers with server consolidation," he said.

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Crossroads executives also said its ServerAttach SA20, a device for connecting midrange SCSI servers to Fibre Channel SANs, is now available to the channel.

The SA20 has a list price of $15,599 and is available via distributors as well as direct to a number of solution providers.

The SA20 is a follow-on to the SA40, introduced in January, said Griswold. The SA40 allows high-end servers for which no Fibre Channel host-bus adapters are available, including IBM's iSeries and pSeries, Compaq's OpenVMS or Alpha, Hewlett-Packard's 3000 and 9000 series, and similar servers from Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics, to connect to a Fibre Channel SAN, he said.

Crossroads is developing programs for solution providers to help customers upgrade the company's legacy 1-Gbps Fibre Channel routers to 2-Gbps models, said Griswold. He said he expects to unveil the program shortly.