CNT Introduces New Generation Storage Networking Infrastructure
UltraNet Multi-service Director provides unprecedented performance, scalability, and flexibility for maximum investment protection
MINNEAPOLIS, July 19, 2004 - CNT® (Nasdaq: CMNT) today announced the UltraNet Multi-service Director (UMD), a new generation storage networking infrastructure platform that delivers unmatched performance capabilities and provides the industry's highest levels of scalability, flexibility, and serviceability to support SAN consolidation, tiered storage, ILM and utility computing. CNT's UMD is built for the continuous change and growth that customers face today in their IT environments and provides unmatched investment protection and lower total cost of ownership.
CNT is introducing a new category of director with this industry-leading multi-service director product. In addition to the high availability and RAS features of traditional directors, multi-service directors offer active-active load sharing and fail-over capabilities, completely hot swappable components, advanced diagnostics and proactive reporting capabilities.
Unlike traditional directors, which only provide higher port counts and high-availability design, the UMD provides a powerful spectrum of features and benefits. The UMD delivers:
superior scalability in ports, protocols and speeds without limitations or compromise
a flexible upgrade path from 1 Gbps to 2 Gbps to 4 Gbps to 10 Gbps
the ability to seamlessly integrate a variety of services as needed by the enterprise, including protocols, security, CNT's unparalleled WAN and MAN extension, storage services like virtualization, and management services.
In addition, the UMD guarantees customers investment protection by providing a built-in customization and upgrade path in the product architecture that can meet the evolving requirements of storage networks. Its flexibility in performance, ports, advanced services, and protocols for current and future connectivity delivers growth without limitations.
The UltraNet Multi-service Director is designed and priced to allow customers to start small, grow, and evolve with the same director platform, which reduces their overall cost of ownership. This growth strategy makes the UMD valuable for SMB and enterprise customers looking to consolidate SAN islands; implement a strategic SAN infrastructure that will meet evolving needs around ILM, tiered storage or storage services; or migrate from DAS to SAN on a platform that offers strong investment protection.
The UltraNet Multi-service Director family of products is designed to meet customers' storage networking requirements today and into the future. The UMD-16, the first model to be released in the family, supports up to 256 non-blocking ports of FICON and/or Fibre Channel. Additional models in the family include the UMD-2 for departmental and remote data centers; UMD-7 for mid-sized businesses or small data centers; and the UMD-32, designed for service providers or very large organizations. CNT is committed to interoperability with all the major storage and switch vendors, including Brocade.
The UltraNet Multi-service Director family is built on CNT's unique UltraScale™ architecture, which provides an unprecedented 5 Tbps of system throughput for up to 512 non-blocking ports at 4 Gbps data rates. In addition to being protocol and speed agnostic, its non-blocking and low latency design provides 'plug-n-go' simplicity for customers, delivering predictable and consistent performance across every port regardless of load, negating the need to design around hot spots and load spikes. This allows for uncompromised performance at full capacity or when deploying storage services.
"While this announcement is revolutionary for the storage networking industry, it is a natural evolution for CNT. CNT has been helping customers move, manage, consolidate and protect their data for over 20 years. This is the logical next stage- bringing together the combination of our fourth generation enterprise director platform, our market-proven WAN/IP extension technology, and our storage services expertise into a single platform designed for our customer's continually changing IT environments," said Tom Hudson, president and CEO at CNT.
"Today, more than ever, customers are looking for infrastructure solutions that deliver scalability, high availability, performance and increased productivity while emphasizing investment protection. The UMD sets a new standard in meeting those requirements," Hudson continued. "Add to that our inVSN management software, professional services, bandwidth provisioning, integration and worldwide support, and you have the end-to-end solution customers require. This product line gives CNT a much broader basis to address both mainframe and open systems storage networking requirements across the enterprise. We will work with our partners and customers to grow the trusted relationships that we have built over the past two decades."
Availability
UltraNet Multi-service Director will be available in Q3.
About UltraNet Multi-service Director
The UltraNet Multi-service Director is the only true multi-service director on the market. This new generation storage-networking platform delivers unprecedented scalability, flexibility, and investment protection to meet dynamic and evolving business requirements for IT strategies like SAN consolidation, tiered storage/ILM and utility computing. The UMD features the UltraScale™ architecture, which offers scalability up to and beyond 512 non-blocking ports at 4 Gbps speed and the flexibility to upgrade as speeds and protocols evolve. The UMD delivers unmatched and uncompromised performance at full capacity and is the industry's only platform for meaningful deployment of WAN/MAN extension and storage services such as virtualization and data replication.
For more information, visit CNT's Web site at http://www.cnt.com or call 763-268-6000.
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