Dell entered the Fibre Channel over Ethernet market last week with OEM deals from Brocade and QLogic and endorsed 10Gigabit Ethernet as a customer’s technology of choice.
The company also announced new EqualLogic storage arrays that support 10G Ethernet connections to the network. The company says that by adopting 10G Ethernet and FCoE that customers can decrease their acquisition costs by 50 per cent and their network management costs by as much as 76 per cent.
The company introduced that its entire PS6000 series storage arrays will support 10GbE technology. Further they introduced two new arrays – the EqualLogic PS6010 and PS6510 – which has 10x more bandwidth per port than previous versions.Dell also signed an OEM agreement with QLogic for its single-chip Converged Network Adapters (CNA).
The PCI-Express-based adapter will ship in Dell PowerEdge servers; the mezzanine card, which was designed especially for Dell will ship with its Blade Servers.
Dell will also through an OEM deal be launching the Dell PowerConnectB Switches, the company’s first FCoE switch that converges iSCSI, and Converge Enhanced DCB Ethernet.
The Dell EqualLogic PS6500X is available now. The PS6010/PS6510 10G Ethernet offerings are expected to be available mid-December and mid-January, respectively. The Qlogic 10GbE CNA and CNA mezzanine card for Dell PowerEdge Blades are expected to be available in mid-December. The Dell PowerConnect-B MLX, RX, DCX and 8000 series of networking products are expected to be available on Feb. 15, 2010.
