Cisco Wades Into WAFS

Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) has made its first entry into the wide-area file services (WAFS) market, putting its stamp on the product Actona Technologies had when it was acquired by the networking giant in June this year (see Cisco Acts on Actona).

The Cisco WAFS offering consists of Core FE and Edge FE appliances, which enable data from branch offices to be held at a central data center yet accessed at rates higher than traditional WAN links can offer. According to Marcus Chambers, director of Ciscos storage and optical business in EMEA, the gear operates at “near-LAN speeds rather than native WAN rates, which suffer from all the signalling overhead inherent in CIFS and NFS."

The Cisco WAFS kit achieves better performance by caching and serving 95 percent of the signalling traffic it receives locally, leaving only security messages to move with the data itself across the WAN. It's an approach that is supposed to enable storage consolidation in a data center without the performance hit that serving data natively over the WAN implies.

An initial bundle of one Core FE and one Edge FE, sufficient to support 50 users at a branch office, has a recommended retail price of $12,000. A second Edge FE to connect to the same Core FE will cost another $12,000, but expanding the first Edge box to support 100 users costs $4,500.

Cisco's release sharpens focus on the WAFS market, which sources say is moving at a clip, though there are still just a handful of companies involved, including Riverbed Technology Inc. and Tacit Networks Inc. (see Watch Out for WAFS and WAN Accelerators Speed Up).Riverbed VP of business development Eric Wolford says his company has about 60 customers, and Tacit president Chuck Foley claims 40 customers. They both claim Actona saw little traction in the market before Cisco bought it. They're ambivalent over Cisco's entry.

“This will get a lot of attention focused on the market,” Foley says. “[But] nobody wants to step into the ring with a big guy like Cisco.”

The first iteration of WAFS from Cisco clearly follows the roadmap envisaged by Actona. By late 2005 or early 2006, Cisco hopes to deliver WAFS as a blade for its recently launched 2800 and 3800 series routers. The gap between the appliance and blade versions, execs say, is because Cisco plans to build more functionality such as encryption and quality-of-service into its WAFS products before unveiling the blades. Further, Cisco hopes to combine its content-caching wares with WAFS to support protocols beyond CIFS and NFS, such as FTP, secure FTP, TFTP, and HTTP.

Cisco will sell its WAFS products through its traditional partner channel, instead of through Cisco's storage partners, which include EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM).

A source close to Cisco says the company is unhappy at the mark-up these OEMs (or OSMs as it prefers to call them) put on Cisco MDS switches, and Cisco may threaten to open distribution of its storage gear to an EMEA distributor, such as Acal Electronics Ltd.— Rik Turner, special to Byte and Switch