ESG Lab Review
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The SANbox 6000 series of Intelligent Storage Routers extends the reach of corporate storage networks
beyond the reach of Fibre Channel cabling infrastructure using the industry standard iSCSI and FCIP
protocols. The SANbox 6000 can be used to attach low cost servers to high performance Fibre Channel
storage in the data center. When used to extend the connection over long distances to remote sites, the
SANbox 6000 can be used to replicate data center traffic for disaster avoidance.
ESG Lab Review
A Fibre Channel volume residing on an IBM disk array within the core data center and attached to a
SANbox 9000 ultra-high density core switch was accessed from a simulated remote site during the ESG
Lab review, as shown in Figure Eight. A windows server at the simulated remote site used a QLogic
iSCSI adapter to provide remote access to an NTFS file system accessed as drive letter I. A file system
copy of the program files directory from the C: drive in the remote server to the I: drive in the data center
completed in a matter of minutes. From an end-user’s standpoint, accessing data through an iSCSI
connection to the data center felt exactly the same as working with a local hard drive – only the drive letter
was different.
Figure Eight – SANbox 6140 FC to iSCSI Storage Extension
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There were 16,926 companies in the United States in 2003 with 500 employees or more. Those
employees were located over one million establishments, according to the US Census Bureau. A
quick calculation based on those numbers indicates that companies with 500 employees or more have
more than 60 remote and branch offices on average. Hundreds of thousands of storage networks
have been deployed around the world in the past fifteen years, but the opportunity is for millions of
deployments. Storage routing and entry-level SAN in a box technology from QLogic has the potential
to extend the benefits of storage networking beyond the glass walls of the data center and into branch
and remote offices.
Enterprise Strategy Group
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