HEALTH

SAN JOSE, CA -- Cisco today announced a broad-based initiative to promote interoperability testing and cross-product qualification with industry partners that span all major categories within the storage industry. The goal of these collaborative efforts is to ensure solution-level interoperability for the Cisco MDS 9000 Family with storage products in multiple categories including host bus adapters, storage arrays, tape libraries, storage management applications, replication services, and back-up software. Specifically, Cisco has begun working with Adaptec Inc., ADIC, BMC Software, EMC Corporation, Emulex Corporation, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM Tivoli, JNI Corporation, Netreon Inc., QLogic Corporation, StorageNetworks, Inc., and VERITAS Software Corporation in an effort to provide interoperable solutions. "EMC has long believed that all storage will be networked. Cisco's presence will only serve to accelerate that trend," said Erez Ofer, EMC's executive vice president of Open Software Operations. "Cisco's introduction of its new family of storage switches provides further validation of the strength of the Fibre Channel market and the convergence of networked storage technologies. EMC looks forward to testing and qualifying the new Cisco products in our E-Lab facility, the largest and most sophisticated storage interoperability lab in the world." "Cisco's capabilities in networking, presence in the data center, and commitment to standards will transform storage networking," said Mark Bregman, executive vice president of product operations, VERITAS Software. "VERITAS Software and Cisco are working together to deliver integrated, interoperable solutions to our customers. Through the VERITAS Enabled Program, we are qualifying interoperability of the Cisco MDS 9000 Family with our SANPoint Control, NetBackup, and Foundation Suite products in order to provide our customers with complete storage solutions." Additionally, Cisco is driving development of storage industry standards, such as its leadership role in authoring the FC-SP draft standard for secure Fibre Channel communication within T11, co-authoring the iSCSI draft standard within the IETF and promoting enhanced manageability through its work in defining new Fibre Channel, SCSI and iSCSI MIBs. Industry standards will help minimize the level of interoperability testing requirements among vendors and increase customer adoption of storage networking platforms such as the Cisco MDS 9000 Family. "Cisco recognizes that though the Fibre Channel market has advanced greatly through open standards, there is still a need to ensure solutions integration and interoperability, given the business criticality of enterprise storage environments," said Soni Jiandani, vice president of Marketing for the Cisco Storage Technology Group. "Having broad industry support for the Cisco MDS 9000 Family helps achieve the required level of interoperability and the overall reliability of heterogeneous solution deployments."