IBM ships 4Gbps storage system

IBM is shipping 4Gbps (gigabits per second) Fibre Channel storage systems based on technology from Engenio Technology.

The IBM TotalStorage DS4800 4Gbps Fibre Channel system is based on Engenio's new XBB architecture. The XBB architecture is designed to offer support for different operating systems and host types, configuration flexibility, and advanced replication services such as Snapshot, remote volume mirroring and volume copying.

Engenio is also a provider of storage technology to IBM rivals such as SGI, StorageTek, Sun Microsystems and Teradata.

4Gbps Fibre Channel systems are suited for applications such as streaming video on demand, medical imaging, data mining and data warehousing, and large databases driven by online transaction processing (OLTP).

Fibre Channel is coming under increasing pressure from Ethernet-based storage technology that can now offer greater processing speeds. 4Gbps Fibre Channel offers enterprises backward compatibility to existing 1Gbps and 2Gbps systems.