EMC Corporation, the world leader in information management and storage, today announced the new EMC® Connectrix® MDS 9513 Director, which can scale up to 528 ports to enable massive consolidation and tiering of storage area networks (SANs) for information lifecycle management (ILM). In addition, EMC introduced new 4-and 10-gigabits per second (Gbps) Fibre Channel Switching Modules for use in new and existing Connectrix MDS 9000 family products.

Based on technology from Cisco Systems, Inc.®, the Connectrix MDS 9513 can scale to 528 1/2/4-Gbps Fibre Channel ports and up to 44 10-Gbps Fibre Channel ports in a single chassis, allowing greater degrees of SAN consolidation than ever before and enabling users to tier information and scale their data center SANs as their business requirements grow. The Connectrix MDS 9513 runs Cisco SAN-OS Software Release 3.0 and features high availability features, including dual supervisors, support for nondisruptive software upgrades, full redundancy of all critical hardware components, modular software with stateful process restart and support for cross-module inter-switch links (ISLs) that can each scale to 16 ports.

The new Fibre Channel Switching Modules, also from Cisco, provide high levels of investment protection across the entire Connectrix MDS 9000 family. Customers can now seamlessly upgrade their current Connectrix MDS 9506 and 9509 systems to incorporate the latest port speeds and scale them up to 192-and 336-ports per chassis respectively. The Connectrix MDS 9500 series, including the new MDS 9513, also provides integrated multi-protocol support of iSCSI, FCIP and FICON, enabling customers to further consolidate diverse server environments – from small servers using iSCSI to mainframes using FICON – into a single SAN. Additionally, integrated SAN extension support with FCIP gives customers greater flexibility for disaster recovery solutions that span longer distances.

"The new Connectrix MDS 9513 system breaks through the 256-port barrier and provides the scalability and performance to meet the most demanding ILM environments," said Marty Lans, EMC Senior Director of Storage Network Marketing. "Together with Cisco, we are providing our Connectrix MDS customers with the highest levels of flexibility and investment protection, enabling the mixing and matching of modules to achieve optimum performance and service levels in a single chassis."

The new modules and Connectrix MDS 9513 system support the complete MDS 9000 feature set, including Virtual SANs (VSANs), Inter-VSAN routing, advanced management, security and diagnostic features. VSANs improve consolidation and simplify management by allowing for more efficient SAN utilization by creating hardware-based isolated fabrics within a physical infrastructure. Inter-VSAN routing allows a resource on any individual VSAN to be shared by users of a different VSAN without merging the fabrics. SAN OS 3.0 also provides new features for advanced port bandwidth reservation that allows individual ports to operate in dedicated mode, guaranteeing the full configured bandwidth to that port.

The EMC Connectrix family offers the industry's most extensive selection of networked storage connectivity products, ranging from highly available enterprise-class directors to edge switches and management tools. All Connectrix systems concurrently support multiple hosts and operating systems, enabling multiple servers to connect to multiple storage systems from EMC as well as other vendors. This flexible family of platforms helps facilitate the consolidation of information onto fewer storage systems for improved management, protection and availability.

Availability:

The Connectrix MDS 9513 Multilayer Director and the Fibre Channel Switching Modules will be generally available from EMC and EMC Velocity partners in June 2006.