StorageTek announced that it will resell the Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Intelligent directors and fabric switches and related SMARTnet services and support. The Cisco offerings are available to customers worldwide as part of StorageTek's advanced portfolio of storage networking solutions and services. In addition, Cisco has been named to StorageTek's TekSelect partner program. "Versatile and intelligent storage networks are a cornerstone for advancing the information lifecycle management plans of our customers," said JR Roedel, StorageTek senior director, Information Lifecycle Management Solutions. "This alliance with Cisco for intelligent storage networking systems is another step in the StorageTek journey to help our customers improve primary storage productivity, simplify backup and recovery, and enable a flexible compliance and archiving architecture for today and the future." The award-winning Cisco MDS 9000 Family is a comprehensive line of SAN switches and directors for storage networks of all sizes and architectures. Comprised of the Cisco MDS 9500 series directors, the Cisco MDS 9216 series flexible-configuration fabric switches, and the Cisco MDS 9100 series fabric switches, the Cisco MDS 9000 Family is designed to offer high performance and scalability, intelligent network services such as multiprotocol/multitransport integration, Virtual SANs (VSANs), security, advanced traffic management, sophisticated diagnostics and unified SAN management. "Our networking solutions are tested and qualified by StorageTek to be compatible with their advanced enterprise storage solutions, enabling joint Cisco - StorageTek solutions to be quickly and easily deployed at customer sites worldwide," said Ed Chapman, senior director of product management for the Cisco MDS 9000. "Together with StorageTek, we continue to drive intelligence at the network layer and deliver a more feature-rich storage environment highlighted by flexibility, availability and security capabilities designed to support critical disaster recovery, data replication and resource consolidation needs." StorageTek also announced the addition of Cisco to StorageTek's distinguished TekSelect partner program. Introduced at FORUM 2004, StorageTek's annual customer conference, StorageTek's TekSelect partner program is a standardized program to accommodate customer demand for a single point of contact and support for integrated storage solutions. TekSelect partners are hand picked and recognized as leaders in their respective areas of expertise, enabling StorageTek to help enterprises gain control of their growing storage environments, while significantly reducing the time, cost, complexity and risk involved in storage management. In addition to the Cisco MDS 9000, StorageTek currently offers advanced fabric switches and directors from Brocade and McDATA to customers worldwide. StorageTek Global Services provides a comprehensive methodology to deliver assessment, design, implementation and management services for heterogeneous SAN solutions and has installed and maintains over 4,000 heterogeneous SANs worldwide. For more information on StorageTek's storage networking solutions, visit http://www.storagetek.com/products/category_page2006.html