Adoption of 4-Gigabit per Second Fibre Channel Technology Surges
"'Customers in entertainment, healthcare, government research and oil and gas exploration satisfy voracious need for speed and bandwidth by quickly adopting 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel technology.'"
Milpitas, Calif., - Aug 10, 2005 - Engenio Information Technologies, Inc., today announced that shipments of the Engenio 6998 4 Gigabit per second (4 Gb/s) Fibre Channel storage array were 33 percent higher during its first 180 days of general availability when compared with the number of 2 Gb/s Fibre Channel arrays shipped by the company during a similar 6-month introductory period. From February through July 2005, Engenio shipped 360 4 Gb/s storage array systems. This compares with the first 6 months of general availability of the Engenio 4884 2 Gb/s Fibre Channel array technology during which the company shipped 270 systems in the first half of 2001.
The Engenio 6998 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel array, which is based on the Engenio XBB system architecture, was introduced to the marketplace in February. Many of the company's major OEM partners IBM, SGI, and STK make 4 Gb/s systems, based on Engenio technology, available to their customers. Rex Hospital, a leading healthcare provider in North Carolina, and the Defense Department's Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC) both recently purchased a 4 Gb/s storage solution based on Engenio technology.
"I am not at all surprised by the swift adoption of 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel technology," said Flavio Santoni, Engenio Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Customer Support. "The experts' who proclaimed that there wasn't a pent up demand for 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel' were simply wrong. Customers in a wide variety of industries entertainment, healthcare, government research and oil and gas exploration, to name a few are realizing the benefits of 4 Gb/s technology and we anticipate that by 2007 4 Gb/s will be the industry standard."
Companies that benefit from the use of 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel technology include content providers that stream video on demand; medical professionals who exchange images and data over great distances; organizations that conduct data mining and data warehousing; those that have large databases driven by technology such as RFID; and manufacturing firms that move large amounts of data on a regular basis.
"When you consider what data-intensive businesses - like SGI customers - have to contend with, this rapid adoption of 4 Gb/s is no surprise," said Gabriel Broner, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Storage and Software Group, SGI. "Initial 4 Gb customers are among a community of users with voracious needs for speed, consistent demands for simplicity or just want a bigger pipe so a single large stream of data doesn't need to be cut into smaller pieces. We don't expect these needs will ever diminish."
The benefits of 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel technology include: investment protection due to complete backward compatibility with 1 Gb/s and 2 Gb/s systems; higher reliability due to fewer SAN components required; the ability to restore data more quickly in the case of catastrophic outages; and better utilization of storage systems.
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