Alacritech today announced its Alacritech Accelerators, running in conjunction with the Microsoft iSCSI initiator, have met Cisco's testing criteria for interoperability with the Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer storage area networking (SAN) switches. The solutions are designed to enable efficient data management and high reliability with a low overall cost of ownership in IP storage environments.
"The combined Alacritech and Cisco iSCSI solution will help customers cost effectively connect servers hosted on IP to storage arrays and tape libraries, either with native iSCSI connections or Fibre Channel translation," said Bill Erdman, director of Storage Industry Alliances at Cisco. "These iSCSI solutions increase the number of options for customers in hosting storage across networks, including the familiarity and installed base advantages that IP offers for many small-to- mid size companies."
The Cisco testing program sets criteria for interoperability testing under specified test criteria. The program provides enterprise customers with information regarding Cisco partner products and services that the partner or an independent testing group has tested and found to interoperate with the specified Cisco networking technology under the test conditions.
The Cisco MDS 9000 Family provides intelligent networking features such as multiprotocol and multitransport integration, Virtual SANs, advanced security, sophisticated debug analysis tools, and unified SAN management. Alacritech Accelerators provide the industry's highest-performing TCP offload and acceleration technology, and are the only cards capable of moving both file- and block-level traffic. When used with the Microsoft iSCSI initiator, Alacritech Accelerators offer a very high level of performance for iSCSI storage access for Microsoft Windows-based servers. When combined, IT administrators can rely upon these proven solutions to help drive SAN consolidation, increase data availability and ensure efficient management of storage resources.
"Alacritech continues to work closely with Cisco to provide our mutual customers with interoperable, highly efficient IP SAN solutions," said Kim Peyser, senior vice president of Sales and Marketing, Alacritech "The combination of Alacritech Accelerators and the Cisco MDS 9000 Family are ideal for companies looking to implement a scalable, high performance IP storage environment for their Windows-based systems."
The Cisco MDS 9000 Family of multilayer directors and fabric switches offer intelligent fabric-switching services that realize maximum performance while ensuring high reliability levels. They combine robust and flexible hardware architecture with multiple layers of network and storage management intelligence. This powerful combination enables highly available, scalable storage networks that provide advanced security and unified management features.
As systems and servers move increasing amounts of network data, new solutions are needed to solve both efficiency and throughput challenges. Alacritech Accelerators are a complete line of Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet TNIC products based on SLIC Technology, Alacritech's patented Data Path Offload (DPO) architecture. Alacritech's SLIC Technology supplements the TCP software control plane with distributed hardware data planes to maximize data movement through Ethernet-based networks. This revolutionary architecture is designed to maximize server and storage performance and efficiency. All Alacritech products offer industry-standard failover and link aggregation.