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Cisco Collaborates With IBM to Deliver New Fibre Channel Embedded Switches for IBM BladeCenter
Cisco Alone Offers Full Range of Protocols for Embedded Switches: Ethernet, InfiniBand, and Fibre Channel
| Source: Cisco Systems
LONDON -- (MARKET WIRE) -- November 20, 2006 -- Gartner Data Center Summit -- Cisco® (NASDAQ : CSCO ) today announced that it is expanding its portfolio of award-winning
storage networking switches and directors by developing a new embedded
Fibre Channel fabric switch for IBM blade server chassis. The new Cisco
embedded switch will allow customers to deploy end-to-end Cisco intelligent
SAN services, such as VSANs, advanced security, and high availability.
With this addition to its switch portfolio, Cisco is the only company to
offer a full range of connectivity protocols for data center blade servers,
uniquely providing customers with the choice of Ethernet, InfiniBand, and
Fibre Channel to match their business and IT requirements. Customers
benefit through common provisioning and management tools, simplified
operations, and reduced operational costs.
"Today's data center managers need access to a variety of protocols in
order to match the specific requirements of their environment with the
protocol that best supports those needs," said Bob Passmore, research vice
president at Gartner. "Blade servers that can offer multiple protocols and
common management tools provide the flexibility and agility that the
enterprise demands."
Many organizations are deploying bladed server architectures to simplify
management and operations through standardization on a single platform for
operation consistency, reduction in cabling and rack space, and integrated
management. Blade server solutions help customers save in power, cooling,
floor space, time, money, and resources. By offering a full range of
protocols for embedded switches, Cisco helps enable seamless integration
with the broader data center infrastructure and extends the benefits of
multi-protocol intelligent network architectures to blade servers.
Powered by the Cisco SAN OS operating system, the new Cisco embedded Fibre
Channel fabric switch is fully compatible with the Cisco MDS 9000 family of
Multilayer directors and fabric switches for transparent, end-to-end
service delivery in large enterprise environments, while enabling customers
to take advantage of an end-to-end Cisco management framework to simplify
data center operations.
"IBM has been leading the blade server industry with its innovative
approach to systems design and a rich ecosystem of partners, unparalleled
in the blade server market," said Doug Balog, Vice President for IBM
BladeCenter. "We are pleased to be working with Cisco to continue to expand
that ecosystem and look forward to offering our customers the new Cisco
embedded Fibre Channel switch across the entire family of BladeCenter
chassis."
Cisco Data Center Networking Solutions
The new Cisco embedded fabric switch is part of Cisco data center
networking solutions, an integrated set of products, best practices and
services which allows IT architects and data center professionals to take a
phased architectural approach to building and operating a future proof
network platform for their next generation data centers.
Availability
Further details of the new embedded switch for the IBM BladeCenter are
expected to be announced in the first calendar quarter of 2007.
About Cisco Systems
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partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any
other company. This document is Cisco Public Information.