Patent ID: 7363210

Claim:
A communications system for managing and supplying data between several application servers and several storage devices, comprising: at least one data-management device, several application servers which may access the data-management device via different interfaces, and several storage devices, which are based on Fiber Channel and Internet Protocol technology and are connected to the data-management device; the data-management device having the following features: a first Fiber Channel switching device, which is assigned to at least one application server having a Fiber Channel-based interface; a first Fiber Channel switching device, which is assigned to at least one application server having an Internet Protocol-based interface; a second Fiber Channel switching device, which is assigned to at least one storage device based on FC technology; and an adaptation device for adapting the data coming from the first Internet Protocol switching device to the data format of the second Fiber Channel switching device, and vice versa, a database router, J2EE router, and SOAP router which are connected to the first Internet Protocol switching device, the routers each being assigned at least one database server, SOAP/XML application server, and/or one J2EE application server, the database server being connected to the adaptation device, and the SOAP/XML application server and/or the J2EE application server being connected to the database route, wherein the first Internet Protocol switching device is assigned to application servers having at least one database interface, iSCSI interface, CIFS interface, SOAP/XML interface, and J2EE interface.