News Release

Cisco and IBM Complete Interoperability Testing of Cisco ONS 15530 DWDM and Cisco ONS 15540 ESP in IBM GDPS Environments

Joint solution enables high-performance, high-availability business continuance applications for metro optical networks
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Feb 19, 2003

SAN JOSE, Calif., February 19, 2003 - Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), today announced successful completion of application qualification testing of the Cisco ONS 15530 Multiservice Aggregation Platform in addition to the previously qualified Cisco ONS 15540 Extended Services Platform for IBM Parallel Sysplex® and Geographically Dispersed Parallel SysplexTM (GDPS) S/390 and zSeries eServer environments. Proven interoperability in accordance with IBM's test procedures helps the IBM and Cisco solutions to be utilized together to implement a highly effective business continuity program for mission critical applications.

To reduce any impairment resulting from planned and unplanned outages, many companies are now implementing system and storage redundancy with high availability, business assurance, and disaster recovery capabilities. The IBM and Cisco application qualification testing demonstrates that the ONS 15530 and ONS 15540 can support the required GDPS storage and mainframe protocols over metropolitan area optical networks to enable these key requirements for applications such as e-commerce, resource management, customer relationship management, and data warehousing.

"An effective GDPS system relies on continuous availability and a near-transparent disaster recovery process," said Rich Lechner, vice president of sales and marketing, IBM eServer zSeries. "The addition of Cisco's ONS 15530 to the previously qualified ONS 15540 can reduce connectivity requirements while continuing to provide our customers a powerful solution for their high-speed, high-availability networking requirements."

Interoperability testing has been completed for the following IBM application solution environments: GDPS/Peer-to-Peer Remote Copy (PPRC)/ESCON® up to the maximum Sysplex Timer® application distance of 40 km, GDPS/Extended Remote Copy (XRC)/FICONTM up to the maximum supported distance of 100 km, and all IBM protocol requirements of the GDPS S/390 and zSeries eServer environments.

"As enterprises structure a 24x7 business continuance strategy, they need seamlessly flexible solutions that can deliver the power and reliability required for mission-critical applications," said Carl Engineer, senior director of marketing, Optical Networking Group, Cisco Systems. "Working with IBM on this qualification has been an important step in demonstrating the versatility of the ONS 15540 and ONS 15530 DWDM platforms. Together IBM GDPS and Cisco provide an ideal solution for business continuance applications as well as consolidating any type of network traffic."

The Cisco ONS 15540 is a dense wavelength division multiplexer (DWDM) platform capable of supporting 32 wavelengths, and operating at variable speeds from 16 Mbps to 2.5 Gbps or 10 Gbps, over a single fiber pair. The Cisco ONS 15530 is a DWDM Multiservice Aggregation Platform designed for high-density service aggregation applications. The Cisco ONS 15530 can aggregate up to 40 ESCON channels per DWDM wavelength. When used as an aggregation platform with the Cisco ONS 15540, the combined system can support up to 1280 ESCON channels per fiber pair. Other key features include equipment redundancy with automatic fail-over capability, support for ring, point-to-point, and mesh topologies, enhanced management features, and availability designed to be greater than 99.999 percent. More information can be found at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/optical/ps2011/ps4002/index.html

The Cisco ONS 15540/ONS 15530 and GDPS qualification is a recent project in the Cisco/IBM alliance, the goal of which is to deliver to customers the most comprehensive, end-to-end information technology solutions in the industry. As part of this qualification process, IBM Global Services (IGS) will provide full deployment support of GDPS systems including turnkey implementations of the Cisco ONS 15540 and ONS 15530.