HOPKINTON, MA -- Addressing the rapid growth in metropolitan area networked storage, EMC Corporation today announced that the Cisco ONS 15540 Extended Services Platform system has achieved EMC® E-Lab Tested qualification. EMC has qualified the Cisco ONS 15540, a high-end metro DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) system, for interoperability with the EMC Symmetrix® family of enterprise information storage systems and the EMC Connectrix™ director and departmental switches. With the Cisco ONS 15540, EMC's Enterprise Storage Networks can effectively be extended across a campus and metropolitan area, to meet the growing need for data center consolidation, business continuance and data migration. EMC's qualification of the Cisco ONS 15540 system is an important step in the cooperative efforts between EMC and Cisco to enable mutual customers to achieve highly available, scalable, company-wide storage networking environments. "Rapid growth in business continuance, data warehousing and supply chain management applications has resulted in an exponential growth in data storage requirements," said Chuck Hollis, EMC Vice President of Markets and Products. "These applications have become critical to business success, with employees and customers demanding uninterrupted access to corporate systems and data. The EMC-Cisco solution enables companies to extend their storage networks beyond isolated islands in the data center to campus, metropolitan, and wide-area environments. The joint EMC-Cisco metro DWDM solution coincides with a rapid expansion in the availability of metropolitan area fiber optic infrastructure and services. According to a recent study by RHK, a telecommunications industry analysis firm with headquarters in South San Francisco, Cal., the potential market for metro optical storage and data transport technology in North America alone is expected to grow to nearly $3.6 billion by 2004. "Metro DWDM's high capacity, low latency and protocol transparency is exceptionally well suited to the most demanding requirements of storage networking," said Carl Engineer, senior director of Marketing at Cisco's Metropolitan Services Business Unit. "Working with EMC to qualify the Cisco ONS 15540 DWDM solution is an important step in helping customers to consolidate storage resources, protect mission-critical data and reduce IT total cost of ownership." The joint EMC-Cisco solution helps ensure the continued availability of mission-critical applications and the protection of business-critical information by supporting EMC's remote synchronous mirroring solutions across extended distances. EMC's Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF™) software, the industry's leading remote backup and recovery solution, provides real-time data replication between processing environments, delivering 100 percent integrity of mirrored data volumes that are geographically remote from the primary data center. By deploying the Cisco ONS 15540 with EMC's SRDF, customers can scale their disaster recovery environments to meet ever-increasing bandwidth, performance and low-latency requirements, while eliminating the need for expensive, low-bandwidth leased lines or ATM services. The EMC-Cisco solution also supports customers' drive toward simplified management, improved storage utilization and a lower overall cost of ownership by enabling access, interconnection and administration of storage across geographically dispersed locations. By supporting both Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet transparently, the Cisco ONS 15540 allows the extended consolidation of EMC Enterprise Storage Networks, which can consist of both Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) environments. The Cisco ONS 15540 is a highly modular, resilient and service-dense DWDM system that can simultaneously transport any combination of high-speed data, legacy and storage networking connections over an ultra-high-bandwidth optical infrastructure. For more information visit www.EMC.com