Products debuting this month from I-Tech Corp. and Empirix Inc. will help developers and end users evaluate storage systems performance and throughput.
I-Techs SANCommander, available June 18, is a multiport, single-chassis device for generating Fibre Channel traffic at a 2G-bps wire speed, said Tom Robinson, product manager at the Eden Prairie, Minn., company. Pricing for an eight-channel version, the 8002 model, starts at $42,900. Versions will also be available with four channels, at $26,900, and two channels, at $15,900.
Later this year, I-Tech will add the iFCP (Internet Fibre Channel Protocol) and FCIP protocols to its Satellite-32MP protocol analysis tool. That product already supports Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet and iSCSI.
Such emerging tools can be invaluable for the still-immature storage networking business, said John Webster, founder of consultancy Data Mobility Group, in Nashua, N.H. “A lot of the tools just havent existed,” Webster said. “What really needs to come into the market now are things that actually stress the network, so if there are issues, they begin to show up.”
Empirixs Network Emulator 2.0, a storage-specific plug-in to the companys PacketSphere product, aims to fill that hole. It improves on the current version, 1.4, with the ability to perform jitter and reordering on packets injected into a network, so users can gauge how storage devices react to real-world changes.
It costs $25,000 to $60,000 and is scheduled to ship later this month from the Waltham, Mass., company.