Cisco goes to market
Cisco goes to market
With two new reseller agreements under its belt, Cisco is making a run into the storage fray
In what is a major milestone in Cisco’s entry into the storage-area network (SAN) marketplace, the networking giant has signed up two technology heavyweights, Hewlett-Packard and IBM to resell its products.
A few days before its ENSA@work conference kicks off in Amsterdam, Hewlett-Packard (HP) said it was close to green lighting the qualification of Cisco’s MDS 9000 series of Fibre Channel switches. HP has signed a memorandum of understanding with Cisco, and currently has the switches in its labs, testing them during the first half of this year with the intention of offering them to customers in its StorageWorks SANs in the first half of 2003.
On the contract, Andrew Manners of HP said they are upbeat about adding the Cisco switches to the range of storage offerings. “Cisco is making a serious play into storage. So far the products look good,” he said.
The announcement came less than a week after Cisco revealed a reseller agreement with IBM, which will add Cisco’s MDS 9000 Family of fabric and director-level switches to its line of SAN products, including the Enterprise Storage Server (code named Shark), its TotalStorage FAStT midrange arrays, as well as TotalStorage tape subsystems. IBM also expects to finish testing the gear and to start shipping it to customers by the end of the first quarter.
Roland Hagan, vice president of marketing for Storage Products Division of IBM Systems Group said; “This agreement will enable us to expand to a new customer set including telecommunication customers and customers interested in converging fibre channel and IP storage area networks.”
Industry watchers say these could spark subsequent agreements with other large systems vendors such as Sun Microsystems and EMC.
Cisco has been rocking the storage boat since it first started manufacturing Fibre Channel switches with its acquisition of Andiamo Systems in April 2002. The MDS 9000 family, a series of director-class and fabric switches with up to 256 500Mbps ports, is the first product range from Cisco since the acquisition.
Industry watchers expect Cisco’s entry into the storage switch market will cause some tremors at Brocade and McData, which together command nearly nine-tenths of the existing market. In fact, Cisco CEO John Chambers said the company has “the potential to be the number one or number two player” in the storage networking market.
The acquisition followed a soured alliance with Brocade, after the two companies broke an earlier alliance to develop products together. Cisco and Brocade allied in April 2001 to make an FCIP blade for Cisco’s Catalyst 6500 and 7600 series switches that would connect any storage vendor’s switch and bridge SANs across IP. The deal reportedly ended after Brocade delivered a design that connected only the company’s SilkWorm Fibre Channel switches to the Catalyst.
Brocade was unavailable for comment at the time of going to print.
Brendan Leitch, storage market expert with Cisco Systems, could not be drawn for comment on the reasons why the alliance has broken down, only saying the two are now direct competitors.
Mr Manners is right, Cisco is serious about storage. Mr Leitch said the three areas in Cisco that get the most heads and cash for research and development are storage, wireless and IP telephony.
But the company still faces a few hurdles on its path to sell to IT departments. Chief information officers (CIOs) only give Cisco 5.7 out of 10 chance of success in the storage switch market; according to a survey by Merrill Lynch of 100 CIOs in the US and Europe.
But Mr Leitch attributes this rating to Cisco’s different “go to market approach” from mainstream storage vendors.
”Generally the sale is led by system integrators (SIs) or disk vendors. [In this case] the relationship between existing networking group or fibre channel vendor to the sale is to do what is expected. For instance, Brocade does what disk manufacturers would like. Cisco is not going to sell disk, tape or software, its not going into storage software space. We are going after networking and we are starting to create demand for our product and its feature capabilities,” Mr Leitch said.
”You still buy fibre channel switch from storage integrators and manufacturers but they are going to customers and saying ‘are you looking at your networking space? Because you need Cisco in network implementations’,” he said.
Mr Leitch said Cisco is changing the traditional relationship with the customer, held by “all of the big ones”, such as EMC, HP and IBM. “There’s going to be some tension for account control with storage manufacturers,” he said.
But Cisco is also working with all of them and hopes to forge more reseller agreements.On top of this, Cisco has kick started a number of another initiatives, indicating its strong drive into storage over the past year. These initiatives include the formation of an internal Storage Technology Group that is on equal footing with Cisco’s 12 other divisions. In Australia, there are more than 150 people in the sales force.
On the development side, Cisco has introduced the SN 5420 storage router, which is meant to transport data over IP using the iSCSI protocol, released the ONS 15540 dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) optical switch, which is used to bridge geographically separated Fibre Channel SANs, and forged a series of agreements with storage vendors such as QLogic and EMC to deliver storage over IP and Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), which is used to bridge SAN islands.
”You’re going to see more capability out of storage infrastructure to networking side that doesn’t exist today,” said Mr Leitch, of Cisco’s storage developments. Mr Leitch claims Cisco introduced the virtual LAN (local area network) - where you can take a single LAN and split it into multiple virtual LANs.
”Now with IP Ð Cisco is looking into virtual SANs,” he said.
”Customers are complaining about the scalability of SANs, congestion and control in SAN fabric, operating system issues, complex management, who can access what. To overcome this, customers have been building different physical SANs,” he said.
”Instead, Cisco will introduce virtual SANs, where you can scale from 100 to 1,500 users. You can mix and match, and keep admin resources separate for the virtual SAN, therefore lower the amount of SAN infrastructure to invest in,” he said.