HP Storageworks SAN director 4/256

HP Storageworks SAN director 4/256 ... scalability for Storage Area Networks (SANs) in mission critical enterprise environments.

The 4/256 SAN Director is the industry's first Fiber Channel director that supports 4 Gb/s port speeds. It delivers state-of-the-art performance and scalability with up to 256 ports in a single domain. The high-performance architecture provides auto-speed negotiation to support legacy 1 and 2 Gb/s server and storage devices for maximum flexibility. The new 4 Gbit/sec technology also provides the ability to aggregate up to eight 4 Gb/s ports to create an Inter-Switch Link (ISL) trunk (optional software) for up to an unprecedented 32 Gb/s of bandwidth. With Extended Fabric software (optional) distance support for extended applications has been increased to support distances up to 500 kilometers depending on speed. The new director also extends the distance for data transferred through ISL Trunking which enables new levels of performance between data centers.

The 4/256 SAN Director is designed for continuous operation and supports "five-nines" (I.e., 99.999%) availability. The director is engineered with built-in redundancy; FRUs capable of hot-swap install/de-install, and hardware and software upgrades concurrent with operation.