Standardizing and Simplifying SANs Currently when implementing SANs, customers must sort between multiple hardware components and management software offerings, based on numerous technologies from multiple vendors. It is often very complex and expensive for OEMs and IT departments to undergo all the steps of SAN design, acquisition, deployment and operation. OEMs and storage network administrators rely on the ability to standardize on proven technology that works and scales with their existing infrastructures. The QLogic SANblade is designed to address IT and OEM issues, supporting a broad range of topologies and customers' application-specific requirements with a common hardware interface platform, software management suite, driver interface and sales channel. The SANblade family currently consists of board-level solutions based on Fibre Channel and in the future will include InfiniBand and iSCSI products.
Blades are a great asset to the data center, saving valuable space and power consumption.
While these products will be introduced this year, IDC believes server blades and related technology will find an explosive market opportunity over the course of our five year forecast period. With over 15 years of enterprise storage experience, the company delivers a full range of Fibre Channel switches, PCI host bus adapters, controller silicon and management chips for systems and peripherals, as well as the QLogic Management Suite of SAN management software solutions. Any announcement that does not appear on the QLogic web site has not been issued by QLogic. With the exception of historical information, the statements set forth above include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. The Company wishes to advise readers that a number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements.