* Xiotech to resell Cisco's MDS 9000 and SANtap software
Last time, we discussed how switch vendor McData is using its relationships with storage manufacturers to enhance its position as a storage-area network systems supplier. As switch vendors look to provide services that extend beyond “just” switching, relationships with storage manufacturers become even more important. Today, let’s look at what Cisco has been doing in this area.
At the end of last week, Xiotech announced a deal to sell Cisco’s new MDS 9000 storage services module and its SANtap software.
The MDS 9000 is a standards-based platform capable of hosting multiple partner applications that extend across the SAN fabric. Expect such applications to include solutions for storage provisioning, data migration, replication, backup and recovery, disk capacity utilization and storage management.
All of these applications are, of course, available today. However, the Cisco approach moves the residence of a number of them. Depending on whom you speak with, volume management can be on the host, on the array or in the fabric. Cisco moves it off the host and onto MDS 9000. In like fashion, snapshot and replication technology, typically residing on the arrays, are also moved to the storage services module.
The issue at the heart of this is: Where does the virtualization technology belong? Historically, the answer to how such technology should be implemented has been a function of how virtualization is to be used and, at least as often, what sort of virtualization technology your vendor had to sell.
Remember that virtualization allows a series of “one-to-many” relationships between various pieces of technology. Put virtualization on the arrays and a user (or process) can access many arrays. Put virtualization on the servers and multiple users can access an array.
Put virtualization on the network and one-to-many becomes “many-to-many”; multiple users (whoever has access to the SAN) gain access to the contents of multiple arrays (whatever storage is virtualized on the SAN). Assuming the pricing works in your favor, it is likely to turn out to be the best of both worlds.
Cisco’s SANtap works with appliance-based software, and under some conditions will increase the value of appliances already on site. For example, it can be deployed to distribute certain workloads to multiple appliances and can remove the requirement for some appliances to sit in the data path. Whether the latter is of real value is as often a question of philosophy as it is one of technology.
Cisco also works with FalconStor, Kashya, Topio and other partners to provide replication, point-in-time copy and continuous data protection solutions.
Cisco has turned to Xiotech because in the course of Xiotech’s 10-year existence it has developed an increasing presence in midsize IT rooms, particularly in financial and healthcare markets. Xiotech should pick up some useful technology from Cisco, and Cisco is likely to gain increasing access to the midsize market.
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Don’t forget, final entries for THE GREAT 2005 STORAGE HAIKU CONTEST should be e-mailed by the end of next week. Remember to take advantage of Rule #10 (“Preference will be given to haikus that demonstrably were written on company time”). For other rules, see the previous edition of this column, or e-mail me. Let’s prove to all those humanities majors out there that storage nerds also have a sense of aesthetics, delicacy and taste – plus an ability to count to 17!
