infoTECH Feature

May 27, 2009

StoneFly Selects BLADE's Ethernet Switch

By Vivek Naik
BLADE Network Technologies and StoneFly, a wholly owned subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory, have announced that Stonefly has selected BLADE’s cloud-ready RackSwitch G8124 10 Gigabyte Ethernet Switch for deployment with its latest virtualized Internet Small Computer System Interface Storage Area Network appliance, the Voyager IP SAN.
 
Company officials at Stonefly say that they tested their new product (pictured below) by using the G8124 and other 10 GbE switches and found that BLADE’s solution delivers the quickest iSCSI SAN performance of up to 950 megabytes per second (MBps).
 
“StoneFly’s (News - Alert) test demonstrates that BLADE’s RackSwitch delivers best-of-breed 10 Gigabit Ethernet performance required in today’s virtualized and cloud computing environments,” said Dan Tuchler, VP of Product Management and Strategy, BLADE Network Technologies. “BLADE’s RackSwitch is ideal for service providers, financial institutions, web hosting companies and e-commerce sites and cloud computing environments where top storage performance is imperative.”
 
Stonefly claims that it is the latest member of the StoneFly Storage Concentrator family of IP SANs, comes with default GbE connections and optional quad GbE connections, 16 Terabytes of storage capacity, supports SATA, SAS (News - Alert) and SSD disks with twenty 10 GbE ports for SAN linked servers.
 
“Our new Voyager appliance is our fastest SAN yet,” said Bahman Jalali, Director of Product Management for StoneFly. “With BLADE’s RackSwitch, it supports over 950 megabytes per second delivering by far the best performance of any 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch that we tested. With more than 75 percent of our customers either considering or currently using server virtualization, the Voyager solution works flawlessly with BLADE’s RackSwitch to give them the speed and performance they require, plus high availability to ensure support of the most demanding applications and IT environments.”
 
The G8124 SFP+, where SFP stands for Small Form factor Pluggable, TMCnet reported, combines comparatively low cost per port, an electric power rating that uses only 170 watts, an overall design that effectively lowers the cost of cabling, and is suited for 10 Gb Ethernet switching. It is designed to interconnect nodes in a network with each other. The resulting mesh network created, called a switching fabric, can easily be scaled up since a theoretical maximum of 16 million devices can be connected.
 
The hardware and software together with the mesh network are integrated to form a single software driven and controlled virtual network. This added extensibility reduces the requirements for additional and costly equipment that may have otherwise been added down the line. Its non-blocking characteristic, sub 700 nano-seconds latency and IGMP snooping support also contribute to high performance computing, cloud computing and I/O-intensive virtualized applications.
 
Voyager IP SAN and RackSwitch G8124 support VMware vSphere so that customers have an extensible IP SAN in a virtualized, cloud computing environment, and together also support a wide range of virtual server environments including VMware, Citrix XenServer, Virtual Iron and Microsoft (News - Alert), say officials.
 
Don’t forget to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users.

Vivek Naik is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Vivek's articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Michael Dinan
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