Data-Center High Availability for the SAN Backbone

Enterprise SANs allow all of your data to be centralized for simpler administration, management and backup. The data center is the backbone for your enterprise SAN. And SAN backbones require director-class switches.

Directors provide:

• 99.999% high availability—If 99.9% availability were enough, 3,056 copies of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal would be missing one of its three sections. The 99.9% achievable with fabric switches can cost millions in down time
• Scalability to large, but well managed multi-Director fabrics—not cobbled together clusters of switches
• Fast, consistent performance of 3,200 MB/s bandwidth—even without taking into account high availability issues, 800 or 1,600 MB/s just isn't good enough for a SAN backbone
• Proactive management—not just a fabric view through browsers and telnet sessions

McDATA's ED-5000 Director is the industry's leading Director-class switch holding 99.8% of the director market. With 32 ports and any-to-any connectivity, no other Director provides the same high availability, fault detection and isolation, and continuous uptime. Based on McDATA's data-center experience in developing ESCON technology, the ED-5000 Director offers the 99.999% availability crucial for mission-critical applications. Technology savvy companies have embraced it for server and storage consolidation, and the backbone for their enterprise SANs.