Cisco and IBM Enhance Network-Hosted Storage Virtualization Solution

SAN JOSE, Calif. and ARMONK, New York - July 27, 2004 - Cisco Systems, Inc.® and IBM today announced enhancements to the IBM TotalStorage® SAN Volume Controller for the Cisco MDS 9000, the solution the two companies jointly developed to help customers further drive down the costs and complexity of managing data by providing them flexible, storage area networking (SAN) options to improve storage resource utilization.

Enhancements include support for third-party midrange storage arrays, which will help administrators implement heterogeneous, tiered storage strategies by moving low-activity or inactive data into a hierarchy of lower-cost storage. This allows customers to better match the cost of their storage to the relative value of their data. The other significant enhancement is support for iSCSI connectivity enabled through the Cisco MDS 9000 IP Storage Services Module. Previously, the solution only supported devices connected through Fibre Channel protocol. The extended support for iSCSI devices will further help increase storage utilization and data protection.

Available since December 2003, this solution combines the IBM SAN Volume Controller storage software embedded into a pair of Caching Services Modules for the Cisco MDS 9000 family of switches and directors to provide a solution designed for high availability and high performance. The solution is designed to allow customers to administer volume management, data replication, and point-in-time copies directly from the network, giving them a single point of control and management across multiple storage subsystems.

The University of Cologne was the first customer of the IBM SAN Volume Controller for the Cisco MDS 9000, which it acquired and deployed with help from IBM business partner c.a.r.u.s. Information Technology GmbH Rhein-Main.

"With the network-hosted storage virtualization capabilities of the IBM SAN Volume Controller for the Cisco MDS 9000, we are able to make the paradigm shift today from managing storage on different servers to a switch-based vendor-independent management model," said Claus Kalle, manager of the systems department at the University of Cologne. "We look forward to deploying the extended capabilities of the solution, which we expect will further maximize our return on investment, improve personnel productivity and increase application availability."