Reseller agreements help Cisco get into SANs

Cisco this week announced a strategy for getting its storage-area networking products into the hands of customers.

“Announcing a strategy” is kind of a strange thing to do – the company’s actions and products should stand on their own. However, it is interesting to see how Cisco is approaching this growing market. After all, Cisco is known more for routers and LAN switches, and the question remains whether extending that expertise into SANs is a natural extension, or forced.

More or less, the strategy consists of not going it alone – establishing reseller agreements with large system and storage equipment vendors, including EMC, HP, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems. The storage vendors are the primary distributors, working through their own channels as well.

EMC just last week said it plans to resell Cisco’s MDS 9509 Multilayer Director and MDS 9216 Multilayer Fabric Switch. These are switches that support both Fibre Channel and iSCSI, which is used to extend storage networks over IP. For more on that announcement, see:

https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0429emccis.html

If Cisco can get its storage networking gear accepted as companion pieces to products from established storage vendors, the company has a foot in the door. Plus, it would help Cisco overall, as any advance in IP – whether it carries storage data or other data – is good for the company.