Cisco Implants IP in SANs

Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) has at last pulled the pieces together on its storage-over-IP strategy, rolling out a multitiered approach to bridging Fibre Channel SAN islands to the IP mainland (see Cisco Extends SANs Over IP).

Cisco's new SAN extension options include a Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) adapter for its 7200 and 7400 routers and a new version of its SN 5428 router that supports FCIP. The company is also taking this opportunity to rehype the IP module for its Fibre Channel switch family, which it originally announced last summer.

"Anywhere you can provide IP, you can now connect your SANs," says Ed Chapman, senior director of product marketing in Cisco's storage networking technologies group.

Of course, Cisco goes into this expecting to dominate the market for IP-based networking technologies of all stripes. And it now may have put together a broader and deeper storage-over-IP story than anyone else in the industry. CNT (Nasdaq: CMNT) and Nishan Systems Inc. are two vendors that should be concerned with Cisco's increasing encroachment on their territory

The FCIP port adapter for Cisco's 7200 and 7400 series routers uses a TCP/IP offload engine chip supplied by Adaptec Inc. (Nasdaq: ADPT). This module, with a list price of $10,000, is designed to let customers interconnect their multiple Fibre Channel SANs over long distances via FCIP, an encapsulation protocol developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The single-port adapter module is able to support up to OC3 (155-Mbit/s) links, Cisco claims.Byte and Switch readers will recall that at one point, Cisco was working with Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) to develop a similar FCIP blade in a project code-named RedHead. That relationship quickly turned rancid as it became evident to both parties that Cisco would soon be positioning itself as a major Brocade competitor via its Andiamo Systems Inc. Fibre Channel switch startup (see Cisco and Brocade: This Means War, Cisco SAN Plans Get Tangled, and Cisco Reaffirms SAN Strategy).

Speaking of Andiamo, Cisco says it's also finally ready to talk about the MDS 9000's IP storage services module, which supports both iSCSI and FCIP simultaneously on each of its eight Gigabit Ethernet ports. Here, too, FCIP is intended to extend FC SANs across IP; iSCSI is supposed to give IP-enabled servers "fan out" access to Fibre Channel SANs.

So what's new about the IP storage services module since Cisco teased it at the original August 2002 launch of Andiamo? (See Cisco Buys Andiamo and Cisco's Creative Andiamo Options.)

Not much. Actually, more like nothing: All Cisco is announcing is that it's expected to be officially shipping by June. The company wouldn't provide pricing, which it says it's leaving up to its reseller partners, including Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM). Cisco is still waiting for official OK from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), which is in the process of certifying the MDS switches with its storage systems (see Cisco and EMC Edge Closer, Sprint Puts Cisco to Test, Cisco Gets Set, EMC Holds Off on Cisco, and IBM Tells Cisco: 'Let's Go!').

When we asked about the performance of the MDS 9000's IP storage services module, Cisco was hard to pin down. "We're going to have white papers with performance characteristics," says Chapman. When connecting multiple servers over iSCSI, he says, "It depends on the number of PCs and the I/O of applications; there's no hard and fast rule... You could have up to, say, five different servers on one GigE port, or maybe 15. We do wire rate on the GigE port, so it gets down to how comfortable a customer is in connecting a number of servers to one particular port."Finally, Cisco has introduced the SN 5428-2, an upgrade to its previous iSCSI-to-FC switch that now provides FCIP support on the switch's two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Chapman says adding FCIP required a hardware upgrade, although it's still the same price as the 5428 ($11,995 list).

For many IT executives, replicating and recovering corporate data over long distances for business continuity remains a critical concern. Cisco will be doing the heaviest pitching of its IP-based SAN extension options along these lines (see Feds Set DR Regulations).

Cisco says it has been testing its FCIP products with several third-party data replication and remote copy software applications -- including EMC's Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF), Hitachi's TrueCopy, and HP's Continuous Access -- but it hasn't officially completed any of these certifications yet.

Separately, in another offering tailored to business continuity, EMC, Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO), and Nortel Networks Corp. (NYSE/Toronto: NT) this week are expected to announce a three-way certification of their products in this category [ed. note: storage trois?].

The vendors have tested Legato's Automated Availability Manager application-failover software with EMC's Symmetrix Replication Data Facility (SRDF) synchronous disk mirroring software running on either Symmetrix or Clariion systems, running over Nortel's OPTera Metro 5100 and 5200 DWDM optical networking platforms. The combination of products has been certified for distances up to 200 km."When you start getting into two- and four-hour recovery time objectives, this is a key type of solution," says David Purdy, EMC's director of business continuity technologies.

He adds that, while the EMC/Legato/Nortel offering is conceptually similar to IBM's Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS), a high-availability application for IBM zSeries mainframes, GDPS is limited to distances of up 40 km.

— Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch