Cisco's Storage Strategy Emphasizes Intelligent Networking and Partner Product Integration

April 3, 2006

Cisco entered the storage market with an innovative strategy of consolidating storage and data networking through integrated intelligence on a platform that gives customers ready access to information located throughout the enterprise. Today Cisco is recognized as one of the top vendors for high-end storage switches. Ed Chapman, Vice President of Product Management, for the Data Center and Switching Business Unit, discusses Cisco's storage strategy with News@Cisco.

How does storage fit into Cisco's overall strategy for the business center?

Ed Chapman: Storage systems are vital to every customer and every business application. As our customers store more data in more places to meet regulatory requirements and satisfy their own operational needs, the scalability, security, and reliability of the network that provides access to that stored data becomes critical. We provide the infrastructure that lets our customers access data stored on any device, anywhere in the network. That makes storage networking a vital and extremely strategic part of our overall business, and also a part in which we can excel. Cisco has tremendous expertise in building, managing, and scaling very large data networks. We've extended that expertise to storage networking, and now provide the tools to cost-effectively manage an integrated data and storage environment over an IP infrastructure.

What are your customers' greatest concerns about storage?

Ed Chapman: Our customers are very concerned about business continuance and investment protection. They need to feel comfortable that their critical business applications will always be available to their users and that their storage systems will always be available to their applications. And when it's time to upgrade, they want to be able to add new hardware or new features without ripping out chasses or retraining IT staff. Fortunately, we've been focusing on business continuance and investment protection for a long time in the IP data world, and they are two of our greatest strengths. We're known for our highly reliable, easily scalable data networking products and we bring that same focus to the storage infrastructure. We also bring that expertise into our relationships with our storage Partners to add value to their offerings.

What differentiates Cisco storage solutions?

Ed Chapman: Customers used to come to us and ask how they could gain access to remote storage devices located throughout their network. Today that need has evolved into integrating storage resources into the network itself, so they are naturally linked. Our customers want to build an integrated architecture that lets them start small and grow across geographic areas as easily as within a single site. And, they want some assurance that they'll be able to access data located throughout the network and maintain business continuance even through catastrophic events such as hurricanes. That's something we've been very good at on the data networking side, and it is one of our greatest differentiators. We look at the whole infrastructure instead of just point products. Our solutions encompass the big picture of security, performance, and cost, as well as functionality. Now we're tying that approach into the storage networking infrastructure and providing those same benefits to our customers from a storage perspective. That's the unique value that we offer. No other company provides that holistic look at your entire network infrastructure.

What is Cisco's greatest challenge in addressing storage management needs?

Ed Chapman: Our greatest challenge is looking beyond storage networking to make sure that our environment integrates well with our Partner offerings to maximize the value that they offer. Our customers often come to us and say they're running servers from one vendor with storage arrays from another vendor. They want to know how we're going to work with those companies from a data center perspective to make sure that everything works together. That's our greatest challenge-creating a single, cohesive environment that combines the best that we have to offer in secure data networking with our Partners' value-adds.

Where we going to see Cisco in the next five years with regard to storage?

Ed Chapman: We provide solutions that connect customers to their storage systems, securely and reliably, from any point in the network. One area that does have high potential for us is the growing use of storage outside of corporate networks. People need storage for music, for digital video recording, and for photographs, and the market for devices that provide that storage is growing fast. The growing use of data storage in the home is of interest to us because we're in the business of interconnecting storage devices and making data access through that interconnection as easy as access to Web servers. We've always been a leader in providing ubiquitous access for network communications, and we can do it with storage also. That's our ambition for the future, and every storage product we introduce and every bit of intelligence that we design into all our products is aligned with meeting that goal.