IBM to resell Cisco's Fibre Channel products
IBM to resell Cisco's Fibre Channel products
In a deal that could be the first of many, Cisco Systems and IBM have joined forces to combine the companies' Fibre Channel storage-area networking products.
Building on the strategic alliance between IBM and Cisco, IBM will sell Cisco's open storage networking products. The deal could spark subsequent agreements with other large systems vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun and EMC.
IBM 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 expects to finish interoperability tests of these products and announce their availability by the end of the first quarter in 2003.
Roland Hagan, vice president of marketing for Storage Products Division, IBM Systems Group said IBM is the first vendor to enter into a reseller agreement for Cisco's new multiprotocol SAN switches.
"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," Mr Hogan said.
Cisco first started manufacturing Fibre Channel switches with its acquisition of Andiamo Systems last year.
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