These switches deliver industry leading scalability, selection, performance, high availability, manageability, and security for SAN consolidation and significantly increase ROI and lower TCO for IT.
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The Cisco MDS 9000 Family is included in the Fibre Channel SAN switching market. An IDC 2007 forecast estimated this market will grow from $2.6B in 2006 to $3.2B in 2009.
Q2.
What trends are occurring in this market, which could accelerate market growth?
A2.
For many corporations, storage capacity is doubling every 9-12 months. Customers are moving from terabytes to petabytes of data.
Exponential information growth has led to two important trends in the storage market: the transition from direct-attached to networked storage and the movement from discrete SAN silos to interconnected SANs. Networked storage is the fastest growing segment of the storage market. Today, 2/3 of all storage is still direct-attached while only 1/3 is networked. Within 3 years, that ratio will be reversed. The increased adoption of storage networks leads to the second important trend: the migration from discrete SAN silos to interconnected SANs. This is an important transition from first generation to second generation, intelligent SANs. Both the migration from DAS to SAN and the consolidation from first generation to next generation SANs create new market opportunities for storage and storage networking companies.
Q3.
What new customer
requirements have resulted from this transition in the storage
networking market and how do the Cisco MDS 9000 SAN switches
address them?
A3.
Today, many Fibre Channel SANs are deployed as independent silos, segregated by application or organization. Current product limitations such as lack of scalability, manageability, and security made it difficult if not impossible to build large-scale SANs. The critical need for business continuance, disaster recovery and increased capacity utilization across the organization has made remote SAN connectivity a business imperative. To enable this, customers must be able to connect SAN islands within the data center and across geographically dispersed sites in a reliable, secure manner.
A new approach to storage networking is essential to deliver these next generation solutions. Cisco is driving this innovation by introducing storage networking products with multiple layers of network and storage intelligence. By moving intelligence into the storage network, centralizing management and introducing some familiar intelligent networking concepts to storage networking, Cisco is providing customers with the ability to build and manage integrated SAN infrastructures and to realize the significant financial and operational benefits of integrated storage networking.
Q4.
What are some of the top-level product differentiators of the Cisco MDS 9000 product line when compared to other vendor SAN Directors and Switches that HP offers?
A4.
The Cisco MDS (Multilayer Datacenter Switch) 9000 Family is a comprehensive line of multilayer intelligent storage switches, including both Directors and Fabric Switches, which share a common hardware and software architecture. The technology innovation in these products (Cisco has filed for 24 patents to date in the areas of storage, networking and security) can help customers lower the TCO for storage networking and enable consolidated SAN infrastructures.
The Cisco MDS 9000 family offers a unique platform approach for building intelligent, scalable, multi-protocol SANs. These advanced platform capabilities address the evolution of SANs including the need for greater scalability, throughput, mixed application and server requirements across a shared SAN infrastructure, as well as SAN extensions across IP LAN and WAN backbones for improved business continuance.
Today many customers use Cisco switching at the core of their enterprise IP network infrastructures. With MDS 9000 switches these customers are able to deploy MDS switches in these environments and realize the benefit of end-to-end manageability across their storage and IP network environment. This allows customers to take advantage of their current investments and realize a much better ROI while at the same time significantly reducing their TCO.
Q5.
What is unique about the Cisco MDS 9000 technology/products?
A5.
The Cisco MDS 9000 Family provides the industry’s first multilayer intelligent storage solution. Multilayer features include:
Scalability and performance: High port density (up to 528, 4Gb auto-sensing Fibre Channel ports in a single chassis and up to 1,584 Fibre Channel ports in a single rack), industry-leading performance (MDS 9513 Directors provide 2.4Tb per second total internal system bandwidth), and industry-leading high availability features (switch-level and fabric-wide) provide the ability to interconnect discrete SAN islands into an integrated SAN infrastructure.
Integrated storage management: An embedded Fabric Manager, optional Fabric Manager Server and integration with HP StorageWorks Management Essentials and CiscoWorks Resource Manager Essentials (RME) combine to provide end-to-end management across SAN/LAN/MAN/WAN.
Multi-protocol support: Fibre Channel for large data center environments, iSCSI for small/medium business and workgroup SANs and FCIP for remote SAN connectivity.
Intelligent network services: Innovations such as VSANs, comprehensive security and embedded diagnostics, to provide industry leading SAN scalability, performance, security and manageability.
Intelligent storage services: An open platform upon which multiple third party storage management applications can be integrated. These applications include network-based virtualization, replication, and data.
Comprehensive security: Cisco provides the most extensive set of security features available in the storage networking industry. Emphasis has been placed on secure SAN management at the switch and fabric level to prevent unauthorized access as well as on the implementation of secure switch-to-switch protocols to provide secure remote SAN connectivity. Cisco has been instrumental in driving a new Fibre Channel security standard, FC-SP, within the T11 standards body.
Q6.
What is the value proposition to customers for the Cisco MDS 9000 family?
A6.
The MDS 9000 offers customers several significant benefits:
Lower total cost of ownership (TCO): Improved storage administrator productivity, faster problem resolution and reduced service costs due to integrated storage management and network diagnostics, and better utilization of switch fabric due to high availability, increased performance and comprehensive security.
Investment protection: Common architectural framework and shared modules across directors and fabric switches deliver a smooth growth path and common sparing. Multi-protocol support integrates Fibre Channel, iSCSI and FCIP in one system, meeting current and future storage networking requirements. MDS 9513 Directors provide 2.4 Terabits per second total internal system bandwidth, to support integrated 8 Gb and 10 Gb Fibre Channel and beyond.
Interoperability and innovation: The platform leverages open APIs and standard protocols to create an open platform for hosting network-based third party applications and to enable interoperability in a heterogeneous storage environment.
Q7.
Besides HP and Cisco being two well respected names in the enterprise market, what mutual benefits does this relationships offer to enterprise customers?
A7.
HP and Cisco share the same product and solution vision of expanding SANs throughout the enterprise, creating cost effective virtual storage pools across multiple different server classes, especially with servers that today use Direct Attached Storage (DAS). This vision requires networking products that can scale while insuring mission critical data integrity, including effective troubleshooting and diagnostic capabilities. Additionally this vision requires an intelligent SAN switch platform that can leverage IP infrastructures for extending the SAN, as well as offering more affordable host connectivity connections for departmental and workgroup applications. And finally this vision requires a platform that can host intelligent storage application services for network based data replication, data migration and virtual LUN management. HP and Cisco fundamentally believe that these capabilities offer substantial value to enterprise customers and are working together on delivering these capabilities. The MDS 9000 platform delivers on many of these capabilities today, and will evolve over time as part of the strategic business relationship with HP.
Q8.
Is this reseller relationship exclusive to HP?
A8.
No, Cisco also provides switches to market through other storage product companies such as IBM, EMC, HDS and Sun. However, HP and Cisco are working closely together in creating unique solutions offerings that offer differentiation from many of HP’s current and future storage competitors. This unique differentiation is a result of a collaborative effort including HP servers, disk and tape storage qualifications as part of the first phase, and possible future enhancements to the MDS 9000 platform by HP as part of subsequent phases.
Q9.
What does Cisco mean when they talk about their OSM active channel strategy?
A9.
OSM is short for Original Storage Manufacturer. This is a term coined by Cisco as a way in which to identify full storage solution suppliers, through which the MDS 9000 will be sold, including HP. Different from an OEM relationship, the Cisco MDS 9000 family is not re-badged by HP. The “active” component of this OSM approach indicates Cisco’s role in driving end user demand and preference for the product. Cisco will actively participate in creating pull for the MDS 9000 within its customer base and in joint marketing and sales activities with HP. This active participation will significantly help in stimulating demand and driving brand preference. Fulfillment of the MDS products will be through HP storage sales specialists and HP storage business partners.
Q10.
Does this reseller relationship offer any additional revenue opportunities with a customer who has already deployed SANs, especially with non Cisco SAN switches.
A10.
Absolutely. Customers that have already analyzed the SAN value-proposition and have already deployed SANs, are perfectly positioned to take advantage of the new features and services of the MDS 9000 product family. Many of these enterprise customers have hit the limits in terms of adding additional servers, arrays, and building bigger fabrics. These customers may be having performance, scalability, stability, latency, redundancy, and management issues. The MDS 9500 Director Switches solve many of these problems, given the throughput, scalability and advanced intelligence of the product line. Cisco has already engaged directly with many customers on the redesign of their SANs, with the placement of the MDS 9500 Directors in the core, and a total replacement of their current SAN switches. Many customers are now developing plans to consolidate their separate, different vendor SAN islands into a large enterprise SAN. Cisco MDS advanced intelligence is an excellent choice for SAN consolidation opportunities. Furthermore, many customers are beginning to retire their older single speed, 2Gb fabric switches Directors.
These redesigns offer substantial revenue opportunities for HP, as Cisco needs a total solutions partner to implement, and support these new fabric designs. As stated, Cisco has engages directly with end customers, and is anxious to work with HP in the solutions fulfillment of these redesigns. Moreover, the MDS 9000 paves the way for additional server, and array connectivity, and therefore an increased demand for more storage capacity within the SAN. This offers additional revenue opportunity for selling switches, more disk and storage devices, as well as host connections including HBA’s and MDS IP services blades. Further, Cisco is a key supplier in the datacenter and Cisco and HP have an opportunity to team up and capture significant revenue opportunities in the Datacenter.
