Cisco Announces SAN Products Targeted At Disaster Recovery

Cisco Systems Inc. has announced two SAN products that it says will help companies evade or recover quickly from disasters affecting corporate data.

The MDS 9216i fabric switch and the MDS 9000 Multiprotocol Services Module are additions to Cisco's MDS 9000 family of multilayer intelligent directors and fabric switches. The devices are designed to enable the extension of secure SAN services over metro and wide area networks. According to Cisco Data Center, Switching and Wireless Technology group senior vice president Luca Cafiero, they will allow companies to store and access data off-site, making them ideally suited to ensure the safety of corporate data.

"The new products and features introduced today will help our customers transport storage traffic over metro and wide area networks faster, more securely, and more cost-efficiently," Cafiero said in a statement. "This makes our new products ideal for business continuance applications such as disaster recovery and remote tape backup."

Both the MDS 9216i and the MDS 9000 support SAN-OS 2.0, the latest version of Cisco's MDS 9000 operating system, which offers hardware-based IPSec encryption, hardware-assisted compression and extended Fibre Channel buffer credits. In addition, the new devices feature prodigious networking capacity. Each is equipped with 14 2-gigabit/second Fibre Channel ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports that can be configured for Fibre Channel over Internet Protocol or iSCSI.

The announcement is part of the vendor's continuing strong push into the network storage market since its acquisition of Andiamo Systems two years ago. According to Cafiero, Cisco is responding to growing corporate concerns over data continuance and security. "Simply put, enterprises are looking for simpler, cheaper, and more effective technologies to help ensure that they can replicate and backup their data, restore their application processes, and resume their normal business practices as quickly as possible, even in the face of a major catastrophe," he said.Both the MDS 9216i and MDS 9000 are currently undergoing testing, with commercial availability set for the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2004.