Cisco Systems and EMC announced that they intend to provide customers with an end-to-end storage consolidation solution for remote-office data. By combining Cisco wide area file services (WAFS) technology and EMC network attached storage (NAS), customers will have an integrated solution to consolidate branch office data into the data center, allowing company-wide data to be centrally stored, managed, protected and accessed. EMC and Cisco have agreed to develop an OEM agreement, which will enable Cisco to sell and support the EMC NS Series/Integrated NAS solutions. Cisco plans to offer these NAS solutions together with the recently introduced Cisco File Engine to provide a solution ideally suited for enterprise storage consolidation over wide-area networks. The integrated solution will be sold and supported by Cisco directly and through its worldwide partner channel. Cisco currently offers branch-office solutions for networking, security, wireless, voice, caching, and proxy services. To complement these solutions, Cisco is offering the open-standards-based Cisco File Engine series, an appliance-based solution using WAFS, an emerging technology that gives customers LAN-like performance for accessing central files from remote locations. EMC's market-leading enterprise NAS solutions combine a high-performance Celerra" network server with dedicated EMC CLARiiON® networked storage that offers high performance, ease-of-use, and availability. The EMC NS500 Series is a cost-effective, high-availability system that combines simplified NAS management with integrated networked storage. The EMC NS700 Series is a high-performance, highly scalable integrated NAS system with dedicated networked storage. Both are available in single and dual EMC Data Mover configurations and support either Fibre Channel or ATA disk drives. With this integrated solution from Cisco, IT administrators will be able to take advantage of centralized resources for backup and disaster recovery to achieve better protection of their branch-office data. Centralized management will also help to simplify and reduce the cost of data administration for remote offices throughout the enterprise. In addition, customers will benefit from a single point of contact for support and services for this solution.