Seagate Technology announced the successful completion of interoperability testing of its next-generation Fibre Channel solutions. Seagate lead the industry by delivering the world's first Fibre Channel disc drives and is positioned to continue its enterprise leadership as 4 Gb/second technology emerges this year. The FC Plugfest tests were conducted last week at the University of New Hampshire interoperability lab using a range of Fibre Channel devices from multiple vendors.

"Data rate growth in the enterprise has fueled the need for increasingly faster and more scalable systems while at the same time emphasizing cost-effectiveness," said Jeff Loebbaka, Seagate vice president of global marketing. "There is strong momentum toward 4 Gb/sec Fibre Channel solutions and Seagate is aggressively working with the rest of the industry to ultimately create the solutions that will best serve the needs of IT professionals."

The move to 4 Gb/sec Fibre Channel speeds coincides with demands by IT professionals for more highly-scalable, versatile, and cost-effective storage systems. The solution for these system requirements includes the use of high-performance 4 Gb/s FC drives, coupled with capacity-optimized 2 Gb/s FC nearline drives such as the Seagate NL35 Series.

The Seagate NL35 Series drives are a new family of high-capacity, low-cost-per-GB enterprise disc drives that fill the price/performance gap between online and archive storage. NL35 Series drives are purpose-built to integrate seamlessly with high-performance disc drives in enterprise applications, enabling manageable tiered storage solutions that don't compromise application performance or reliability. The NL35 Series Fibre Channel drives will work in 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel tiered storage implementations to create more highly scalable, versatile, and cost-effective storage systems.