Cisco Extends Leadership in Storage Virtualization

Cisco Systems, Inc.® (www.cisco.com) today unveiled significant updates to its network-based storage virtualization solutions that will help Cisco and a wide variety of independent software vendors (ISVs) jointly address key customer pain points related to storage provisioning, data migration/replication, backup/recovery, disk capacity utilization, and storage management costs.

Cisco enables these new solutions, or "Intelligent Fabric Applications," based on open standards such as Fabric Application Interface Standard (FAIS), which has the goal of delivering a common framework for implementing storage applications in storage area networks.

In practical terms, Cisco, through the Cisco MDS 9000, provides an open, standards-based platform with the necessary hardware-assist required to help enable high-performance Intelligent Fabric Applications -- such as network-based volume management, remote replication, and continuous data protection -- from third-party storage software vendors.

These Intelligent Fabric Applications also support the Cisco Business Ready Data Center, an end-to-end network architecture that includes the data network, the storage network, data center connectivity solutions, and integrated intelligent services.

The Cisco technologies that power Intelligent Fabric Applications are available through the new Cisco MDS 9000 Storage Services Module and the Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS 2.1 software release.

The Storage Services Module is a highly specialized 32-port Fibre Channel line card that can operate on any modular Cisco MDS 9000 platform, specifically the Cisco MDS 9500 Series directors and the Cisco MDS 9200 Series fabric switches.

Today Cisco is announcing that EMC Corporation and VERITAS are expected to be among the first companies to offer network-hosted storage applications built onto the Storage Services Module.

"IBM and Cisco have been partnering for years in high-performance, scalable storage virtualization technologies, including Cisco Virtual SANs and IBM's SAN Volume Controller," said Bob Mahoney, business line executive, Storage Networking at IBM.

"Cisco's continued innovation in network-based virtualization continues to amaze me," said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst at Taneja Group.