Cisco Showcases Solutions

RENO, Nev. -- Cisco(R) (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced new products and tools tosupport high performance computing environments. The new Cisco SFS3504 Multifabric Switch is a gateway switch designed to accelerateserver to storage application performance using centralized highspeed storage uplinks. Customers with intense storage I/O needs willbenefit from higher throughput to centrally shared storage resourcesby deploying the SFS 3504 as an aggregation gateway. Cisco is alsointroducing the Fabric Analysis and Correlation Toolkit (FACT), a setof tools which can be used to analyze and manage an entire InfiniBandfabric. FACT shortens the time for initial bring-up for computationalclusters and detects errors that may affect performance. Together,these new products will help customers to improve storage accessperformance, simplify fabric management, and improve diagnostics andtroubleshooting.

The Cisco family of high performance computing (HPC) productsincludes a comprehensive line of Ethernet, InfiniBand and FibreChannel switches offering best-in-class scalability, highavailability, and security, with common management tools, commonconfiguration interfaces, and a common virtualization provisioningplatform designed to provide comprehensive and consistent managementregardless of the protocol used. Together, these solutions supportData Center 3.0, Cisco's strategy to help its customers develop nextgeneration data centers.

HPCwire Readers' Choice Award

At SuperComputing 2007 Cisco was honored with the 2007 HPCwireReaders' Choice Award for Most Important HPC Networking Technology. The coveted HPCwire Readers' Choice Award, determined through onlinepolling of the global HPCwire audience, represents important industryrecognition by the people who deploy and manage HPC technology. Supporting some of the world's largest server clusters, Ciscotechnology has been deployed in research and commercial HPCenvironments throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

SFS 3504 Gateway PlatformThe Cisco SFS 3504 is a next generation InfiniBand double data rategateway designed to interconnect highly distributed server resourcestogether to centrally shared storage arrays in storage area networksand network attached storage. The SFS 3504 is modular, provides upto four gateway expansion slots, and has a best-in-classmulti-terabit-capable backplane for scaling to hundreds of serversacross a single chassis. Because the gateway modules are compliantwith Fibre Channel and Ethernet switching standards, no changes arerequired to existing storage networks. NetApp has been collaboratingwith Cisco to test, benchmark, and validate the Cisco SFS 3504gateway switch with NetApp Data ONTAP(R) GX Systems and Data ONTAP(R)7G Systems for high performance computing environments.

"NetApp provides a unique value proposition to our customers throughour unified storage architecture, extensive data management services,and operational simplicity," said Joel Reich, general manager of theNetApp SAN and iSCSI business unit. "The combination of thesebenefits combined with Cisco InfiniBand solutions provides additionalbusiness value to our joint customers that are deploying highperformance computing storage infrastructures that requireenterprise-class data protection and management."

Cisco Systems Inc.