The move will have little short-term impact on Cisco’s as yet slow progress in the SAN sector, as customers have so far shown only moderate interest in storage virtualization in general, let alone in cutting-edge implementations on smart switches.
But it emphasizes Cisco’s commitment to storage, and in terms of technology could be seen as putting it ahead of the SAN incumbents it is trying to dislodge – Brocade Communications Systems Inc [BRCD] and McData Corp [MCDT] – if only because the IBM application may have been simple to port to a storage switch.
Cisco’s MDS 9000 SAN switches have been shipping since around the beginning of the year, but like other hardware on the market have not yet qualified as smart switches because they have not hosted third-party applications.
Cisco is battling in a market dominated by vendor lock-in resulting from interoperability problems that make very many customers reluctant to mix different suppliers’ gear. This restricts its sales to mostly green-field sites, or new SAN projects.
According to Cisco itself, in the six months to the end of July it sold only around $25m of SAN gear – a tiny dent in a total market for SAN switches and directors – excluding HBAs – that was worth around $847m in factory revenue last year, according to Gartner Dataquest.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
