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Cisco Collaborates With HP to Deliver New Fibre Channel Embedded Switch for HP BladeSystem
Cisco Offers Three 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 HP BladeSystem c-Class. 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.
"With the new Cisco embedded Fibre Channel fabric switch for HP BladeSystem
c-Class, we will offer our customers end-to-end Cisco SAN solutions,
helping customers cut costs and streamline SAN management," said Mark
Potter, vice president, BladeSystem Division, HP. "This new switch is
designed for seamless compatibility between the new BladeSystem c-Class and
current Cisco environments -- a requirement that's paramount for many of
our joint customers."
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.
"Blade servers are increasingly important for server consolidation,
optimizing power, space and cooling, and simplifying data center
provisioning and management," said Ed Chapman, vice president Data Center
Business Unit at Cisco. "From the core of the data center to the edge,
Cisco provides common provisioning and management capabilities, with a
vision of helping to enable end-to-end management for networking, compute,
and storage across the data center landscape."
Powered by the Cisco SAN 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.
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 HP BladeSystem c-Class
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.