Cisco Knocks 'Nerd Knobs'

NEW YORK -- Driving the complexity out of deploying storage networks will be a key part of Cisco Systems Inc.'s (Nasdaq: CSCO) SAN strategy, executed through partnerships with select storage management software companies, Cisco executives said today at the RBC Capital Markets conference.

BMC Software Inc. (NYSE: BMC), IBM Tivoli, EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), and Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) are expected to be among the top-of-the-list companies to ship software that will support Cisco's MDS 9000 storage switches and directors, company officials say (see IBM Tells Cisco: 'Let's Go!').

"The MDS 9000 series is an open architecture, and access to the APIs are available to select partners to fully manage the product line," says Soni Jiandani, VP of marketing in Cisco's storage technology group. "Every variable that can be controlled in this platform has been opened up." In addition, she said, "we don't force customers to use 'nerd knobs' at the get go." [Ed. note: Unless, of course, they like it like that!]

BMC will go into beta this quarter with a module for its Patrol for Storage Networking (PSN) product, a component of its Patrol Storage Manager software, that will support and manage the MDS switches. PSN already supports Inrange Technologies Corp. (Nasdaq: INRG), Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD), and McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA) products.

"Would we normally do this for a piece of hardware with no market share today? The answer is no," says Dan Hoffmann, director of enterprise storage management at BMC. "Cisco is a little different -- no one is going to ignore them."Tivoli will also ship software that supports the MDS line this quarter, and EMC and Veritas have made clear their intentions to support storage virtualization and other management features in the network, with Cisco as a partner. There have been no formal announcements from EMC or Veritas on this front yet (see Veritas Puckers Up for Cisco and Storage OEMs Warm Up to Cisco).

One of the biggest issues Cisco heard from its beta customers was lack of innovation on the management side, according to Jiandani. She notes that the software to manage Cisco's MDS switches includes important diagnostic features, plus more than 80 MIB (management information base) objects that use SNMP (simple network management protocol) to provide management functionality. According to Brocade's Website, its SilkWorm 12000 switch supports just four MIBs.

There is also no global network design for SANs today, Jiandani notes. "These networks can only be deployed as islands and managed separately." Cisco says its Virtual SAN (VSAN) technology provides a way to group together Fibre Channel ports from multiple switches into a single logical (virtual) fabric using the same physical hardware infrastructure, making it easier to manage larger SAN deployments (see Cisco's VSANs: Hype or Innovation?