Sanrad has unveiled the latest in its V-Switch Intelligent Network Switch family aimed at integrating SANs with both physical and virtual server environments.
Sanrad's new V-Switch 3440 and V-Switch 3840 target midrange customers looking to connect both iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage to physical and virtual server environments, said Dave DuPont, CEO of the Mountain View, Calif.-based storage networking vendor.
Improvements in the software for the two switches let customers do data snapshots of both iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage devices, DuPont said. "We can do lots of cool things because of that," he said. "For instance, customers can replicate among different kinds of storage devices."
Other enhancements include easing of tasks like mirroring, cloning, and replication, and adding disaster recovery capabilities to virtual server environments that were built using software from VMware, of Palo Alto, Calif., DuPont said. "We let users use whatever storage they want," he said. "There's no user intervention even if a virtual machine fails."
The new switches, announced Monday, are also server-agnostic and storage-agnostic, which makes them suited to live server migration in virtual server environments, said Kim Tchang, vice president of marketing for the vendor. "This by itself can justify the cost of a Sanrad switch," Tchang said.
Both the new switches feature 4-Gbit-per-second Fibre Channel connectivity, redundant hot-swap power supplies, and compact flash memory. The V-Switch 3440 comes with four Fibre Channel ports, while the V-Switch 3840 comes with eight Fibre Channel ports and higher overall throughput.
Sanrad has been moving fast to embrace the channel in the last year, with sales now going exclusively through indirect channels compared to only 40 percent going indirect a year ago, DuPont said.
Products like the V-Switches are ideal for solution providers because of the channel's ability to work well in heterogeneous storage and server environments, he said.
"For instance, if a VAR only sells Hewlett-Packard storage, he has trouble getting into EMC or IBM SAN environments," he said. "We provide a solution that lets VARs take advantage of existing storage and add whatever he wants. Or if the customer wants to help with remote replication, it doesn't need to buy some high-performance storage, but can use lower-cost products."
The V-Switch 3440 is expected to ship later this month, while the V-Switch 3840 is expected to be available in June.
