Cisco enters the Ficon fray

Networking giant Cisco has joined the growing list of SAN switch suppliers to team with IBM to allow Big Blue's mainframe customers to use Cisco's Ficon connectivity to connect their mainframes to their storage devices.

McData, Brocade and CNT have already announced Ficon support. The introduction of Cisco into the market is sure to stir things up further and intensify competition in the space.

Cisco introduced Ficon connectivity and Ficon Control Unit Port (CUP) management support on the Cisco MDS 9000 with its SAN-OS 1.3 software release. It has also introduced an integrated approach to extending Ficon over Internet Protocol (IP) networks using Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP). IBM qualified these features based on interoperability testing of the Cisco MDS 9000 within IBM S/390 and zSeries environments.

The availability of these features now allow Cisco and IBM customers to address storage networking at an enterprise-wide scale, utilising both mainframe and open-systems computing technologies. For example, the integrated Ficon over FCIP support provides new options for customers seeking simplified, cost-effective ways to implement their business continuance strategies. Previously, customers would have needed a separate channel-extension appliance to extend Ficon over IP networks using FCIP technology.

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