After looking closely at offerings from CNT (Nasdaq: CMNT) and Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), Valero picked SANcastle Technologies Inc.'s Coastline 8100 border switch to connect its remote SAN islands into a single Fibre Channel fabric. "The SANcastle switch was the only device we could find that would allow us to connect a McData SAN and a Brocade SAN," says Arnott.
SANcastle's 8100 includes a feature the company calls Autonomous Regions with Domain Address Translation (AR/DAT), which is based on the industry-standard FC-SW2 Fibre Channel protocol and resolves the issue of incompatibility between switches from different vendors (see SANcastle Retreats to FC Kingdom).
According to SANcastle, its switch keeps intact the mutually independent domain address spaces and zoning strategies of each individual fabric. When one island is disrupted because of planned or unplanned downtime, the disruption will not affect the entire fabric, the company says. Cisco has developed a similar feature, which it calls Virtual SANs (see Cisco's VSANs: Hype or Innovation?).
AR/DAT purports to eliminate undesired Registered State Change Notifications (RSCNs) from one Fibre Channel fabric to the other, stopping these disruptions beyond the individual SAN borders. Whenever a change occurs in the fabric (such as when a new device is added or removed), an RSCN is broadcast to those devices that have registered. This feature is great in a single fabric, but in combining SAN islands, you don't want all these messages going out to every device on the SAN.
Valero contracted with The Covenant Consortium (TCC)
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