Studio Network Solutions announced that its Ellipse Enterprise Fibre Channel HBA for Mac OS X has successfully completed interoperability testing with IBM System Storage DS4000. The Ellipse Enterprise HBA is now confirmed as IBM System Storage Proven under Mac OS X. The IBM System Storage Proven program builds on IBM's already extensive interoperability efforts to develop and deliver products and solutions that work together with third party products.

    The IBM System Storage Proven program supports the ability of independent hardware and software vendors to build high-quality solutions with the latest technology on leading storage platforms as well as reduce solution design time when multiple, tested building blocks have already been pre-tested. The Ellipse Enterprise Fibre Channel HBA (Host Bus Adapter) delivers an industry breakthrough: the ability for Macintosh servers and workstations to take full advantage of RDAC - the fault tolerant, multi-pathing I/O and failover/failback features found in enterprise-class storage systems from IBM.

    "In many ways, the Macintosh platform has the leading role in the overall production process for media and entertainment businesses. Many of those companies, especially the largest, consider the accessibility of their creative assets to be just as mission-critical as everything else in the data center," said Gary Holladay, President of Studio Network Solutions. "There's no longer a need for compromise. Our mutual SNS/IBM customers will now have the advantage of integrating their Macintosh systems into the SAN and knowing their Macs will have equivalent storage fault tolerance as their Linux and Windows servers."

    The Ellipse Enterprise HBA addresses the goal of integrating Mac systems into the corporate storage strategy. With the increasing demand for content creation, the need to integrate Mac systems into large organizations has never been greater. The Ellipse Enterprise driver was engineered, tested and optimized for today’s most throughput-intensive digital media – it offers the ability to effortlessly handle uncompressed HD video and up to 4K film resolution. Advanced read-ahead and write caching techniques actively minimize dips and spikes in the data stream, thereby enhancing the storage system’s performance for the most demanding video and audio editing applications.

    The Ellipse Enterprise HBA is compatible with Mac OS X Leopard and Tiger. It is now available worldwide and can be ordered in single-, dual-, and quad-port configurations of PCIe or PCI-X. It is compatible with Intel- and PowerPC-based Mac servers and workstations.