SEOUL, Korea - October 14, 2003 - Cisco Systems, Inc., announced that the Proactive Security Technology Research Team of the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) has selected Cisco's storage area networking (SAN) switch for its SAN environment. This signals Cisco's entry into the SAN market in Korea. ETRI selected Cisco's SAN switch for its manageability, high availability and scalability.

Led by IBM Global Services, the implementation provider for the project, ETRI estimates that the centralized system control enabled by Cisco's equipment will translate into management efficiency increases of up to seven times, which also means cost savings for the organization.

Another benefit of ETRI's SAN environment is that existing servers and storage devices will be used when expanding nodes within the network to cope with the increasing number of users. As such, without making additional investments for server and storage replacement, system performance and capability can be expanded by simply adding nodes or storage devices.

ETRI will be deploying the Cisco® MDS 9216 Multilayer Fabric Switch in its SAN. The Cisco switch will control the flow of data among the servers and storage devices within the data centers. The Cisco MDS 9216 combines multilayer intelligence with a modular chassis.

The switch also features an innovation from Cisco called virtual SANs (VSANs), which allow more efficient SAN utilization by creating hardware-based isolated environments within a single SAN fabric. Each VSAN can be zoned as a typical SAN and maintains its own fabric services for added scalability and resilience. VSANs allow the cost of SAN infrastructure to be shared among more users, while assuring absolute segregation and security of traffic and retaining independent control of configuration on a VSAN-by-VSAN basis.

"We are really pleased that ETRI has selected our SAN switches. This is the first major win for us in storage networking and will provide a good case study into the quality of our SAN switches," says Joong Won Kim, regional sales manager, Advanced Technology Sales, Cisco Systems® Korea.

"Cisco is continually driving data storage innovation. Coupled with strong local sales support and partnership with excellent storage players such as IBM, we are confident that customers looking to build SANs will find Cisco the best option," he adds.

Cisco has built a comprehensive SAN ecosystem in Korea together with original storage manufacturers (OSMs) such as IBM, EMC, HDS and HP. Cisco is also working closely with SAN cluster-file-system and cluster-volume-manager developer MacroImpact Inc. MacroImpact's SANique product is also used in ETRI's SAN.

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