September 7, 2005

Today, the storage networking industry is still dependent on proprietary technologies that limit customers' ability to fully leverage the benefits of storage consolidation. As data storage capacity requirements continue to increase, the level of innovation in storage networking must keep up match customer needs.

Cisco Systems'® storage networking portfolio leverages Cisco's expertise in data networking and management to provide multi-protocol, highly scalable and highly manageable platform. Upon this, Cisco will integrate industry standards and leading storage industry partner solutions to enable our customers to build and manage larger, consolidated storage networks more cost effectively and efficiently.

This year at a significant point in the company's storage area network (SAN) history, Cisco attends Storage Networking World Europe.

Since February 2004, Cisco has offered a leading platform of SAN technologies, including the MDS 9000 family of multilayer intelligent storage area networking switches, which has been deployed by 2,000 businesses worldwide.

At the same time, the use of MDS 9000-based SAN architectures within Cisco, thought to be one of the most extensive in the world, has enabled the company to carry out an exhaustive return-on-investment study clearly demonstrating its benefits.

To comment on these developments, News@Cisco called upon Buck Gee, vice president of business operations in the Cisco data center technology group.

What is the Cisco vision for SAN technology?

Buck Gee: Our vision for SAN technology is best exemplified by the evolution of the Cisco Data Centre architecture.

This is based on a three-phase approach, from consolidation to virtualization and, ultimately, automation of customers' data centre infrastructures.

Since our entry into the Fibre Channel storage area network market, many of the industry-leading innovations in the MDS 9000 have focused on helping customers implement this architecture.

What has been your own experience with SANs at Cisco?

Buck Gee: The primary business variable that accelerated the migration to consolidated data center SANs was the growth in data storage.

The average total growth rate for storage between fiscal years 2000 and 2002 reached 57 percent, with some environments growing by 100 percent or more each year.

Direct-attached storage (DAS), well-known for its inflexibility and inability to scale to meet enterprise needs, had crossed the 500-terabyte (TB) watermark at Cisco.

Fixed Fibre Channel switches were seen as a temporary solution to meet the demand for increased port count.

As more fabric switches from other vendors were deployed, however, it became clear that managing several SAN islands based on fixed-port-count switches was only moderately more scalable than DAS.

The immature software tools used to manage many disparate and discrete SAN islands created high rates of operational inefficiency, while the subsequent silo-based SAN islands dedicated to multiple business industries did nothing to resolve the crisis of poor utilization.

Between 1998 and 2002, roughly 75 SAN islands were deployed to support four business industries in the United States and Europe, but storage utilization remained below 30 percent.

The Cisco MDS 9000 SAN migration program, in conjunction with DAS-to-SAN consolidation efforts, resulted in significant cost savings in terms of both cost avoidances and cost reductions.

What have been the benefits of moving to this new technology?

Buck Gee: Between January 2003 and January 2004, Cisco deployed 25 Cisco MDS 9000 multilayer director switches in five production data centers.

The largest internal SAN deployment in the company's history, the Cisco MDS 9000 rollout, was the first significant installation of the (then) new Cisco storage networking switches, displacing the traditional storage networking infrastructure.

Today, almost three years later, the Cisco enterprise SAN serves nearly 4 petabytes - up from 2 petabytes last year - of raw networked storage. With nearly 10,000 ports interconnected across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, it is one of the largest SANs in the world.

Specifically what has been the cost benefit of moving to SAN technology?

Buck Gee: As detailed in a white paper that we are making public on our web site, the net present value for the entire project was estimated to be more than US$14.5 million, with an internal rate of return of 74.2 percent. The payback period for the investment was roughly one year.

How have customer requirements influenced SAN technology development at Cisco?

Buck Gee: Maintaining isolated storage, mainframe, server and IP environments continues to represent an ongoing management challenge and a drain on resources for many organizations.

Cisco responded initially by introducing the industry's first integrated multi-protocol switching solution: the MDS 9000 product family.

This consolidated once-isolated Fibre Channel storage network environments, provided support for mainframe environments with IBM Fiber Connection (FICON) and offered integrated support for IP storage and server environments with iSCSI (Small Computer System Interface over IP).

Needing to comply with industry guidelines such as Basel II, customers had to extend the distance between data centers for business continuity applications.

To help address these issues, Cisco introduced the first Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) solution for extending SANs securely over long-distance IP networks in April 2003.

Many customers also highlighted the desire to reduce costs by building one shared SAN infrastructure that could support multiple individual business functions or external customers.

In March 2005, Cisco addressed this in collaboration with the industry by introducing Cisco Intelligent Fabric Applications, the industry's first switch-embedded virtualization solution for supporting network-hosted, network-assisted and network-accelerated storage applications.