Fujitsu Adds Vixel Switches To Storage SystemFujitsu Adds Vixel Switches To Storage System

Vixel Corp. is gaining ground in the storage market one vendor at a time. Vixel makes tiny switches, about the size of a microprocessor, that can be used to replace a shared data bus inside a storage system. Vixel on Monday said Fujitsu Ltd. is the latest storage vendor to adopt its InSpeed SOC (switch on a chip) product.

Fujitsu will implement InSpeed on its ETERNUS 3000 Model 600 midrange storage system. InSpeed will replace the shared bus inside ETERNUS with a switched architecture that should substantially increase hard-disk performance. Fujitsu says it's already processing 150,000 input/output requests for data per second, partly because of InSpeed.

Switches have been used for a long time to connect servers to storage systems on a storage area network, but they haven't been commonly used to replace a data bus. But Vixel is trying to convince storage vendors that its little switch offers a better way. Hewlett-Packard is using the switch in some of its storage products, and Vixel says it's in talks with most of the other leading storage vendors about similar deals.

Using switches instead of shared bus will improve performance at the disk-drive level, says Eric Sheppard, an analyst at IDC. "And with fault isolation, a problem with a single drive won't take down a whole array."