LONDON, England (Gartner Data Center Summit), November 20, 2006 - Cisco® today announced that it is expanding its portfolio of award-winning storage networking switches and directors by developing a new embedded Fibre Channel fabric switch for HP BladeSystem c-Class. The new Cisco embedded switch will allow customers to deploy end-to-end Cisco intelligent SAN services, such as VSANs, advanced security, and high availability.

With this addition to its switch portfolio, Cisco is the only company to offer a full range of connectivity protocols for data center blade servers, uniquely providing customers with the choice of Ethernet, InfiniBand, and Fibre Channel to match their business and IT requirements. Customers benefit through common provisioning and management tools, simplified operations, and reduced operational costs.

"With the new Cisco embedded Fibre Channel fabric switch for HP BladeSystem c-Class, we will offer our customers end-to-end Cisco SAN solutions, helping customers cut costs and streamline SAN management," said Mark Potter, vice president, BladeSystem Division, HP. "This new switch is designed for seamless compatibility between the new BladeSystem c-Class and current Cisco environments - a requirement that's paramount for many of our joint customers."

Many organizations are deploying bladed server architectures to simplify management and operations through standardization on a single platform for operation consistency, reduction in cabling and rack space, and integrated management. Blade server solutions help customers save in power, cooling, floor space, time, money, and resources. By offering a full range of protocols for embedded switches, Cisco helps enable seamless integration with the broader data center infrastructure and extends the benefits of multi-protocol intelligent network architectures to blade servers.

"Blade servers are increasingly important for server consolidation, optimizing power, space and cooling, and simplifying data center provisioning and management," said Ed Chapman, vice president Data Center Business Unit at Cisco. "From the core of the data center to the edge, Cisco provides common provisioning and management capabilities, with a vision of helping to enable end-to-end management for networking, compute, and storage across the data center landscape."

Powered by the Cisco SAN operating system, the new Cisco embedded Fibre Channel fabric switch is fully compatible with the Cisco MDS 9000 family of Multilayer directors and fabric switches for transparent, end-to-end service delivery in large enterprise environments, while enabling customers to take advantage of an end-to-end Cisco management framework to simplify data center operations.

Cisco Data Center Networking Solutions

The new Cisco embedded fabric switch is part of Cisco data center networking solutions, an integrated set of products, best practices and services which allows IT architects and data center professionals to take a phased architectural approach to building and operating a future proof network platform for their next generation data centers.

Availability

Further details of the new embedded switch for the HP BladeSystem c-Class are expected to be announced in the first calendar quarter of 2007.