Cisco entered the fray in SAN switches earlier this year with the MDS 9200 series, which scaled to 48 ports, and the MDS 9500 series, which went up to 224 ports. As figures released last week by market analyst Infonetics indicate, the data networking giant’s entry has already impacted both pricing per port in general and Brocade’s market share in particular.

Today the San Jose, California-based company will announce two models in its new MDS 9100 series, the 9120 (up to 20 ports) and 9140 (up to 40). The products are designed to eat into the traditional storage connectivity heartland of Brocade, which made its name and fortune with the 16-port SilkWorm switch.

As if there were any doubt that such is Cisco’s intent, its EMEA product manager for storage networking Bernard Zeutzius pointed out that unlike their larger brothers, the two models in the 9100 series are Fibre Channel-only, and cannot take IP or iSCSI blades in any of their slots. That means Cisco is launching boxes to compete head-to-head with Brocade in Fibre Channel.

How the new switches will do this is up to the OEM partners, or OSMs, as Cisco prefers to call them. On day one, these are IBM, HP and EMC, all of which will announce that they are certifying the two models and expect to announce relationships within 30 days. They already OEM the bigger storage switches from Cisco, as does HDS, though there has been no formal announcement from the Japanese group.

The Cisco switches’ port counts are slightly different from Brocade’s switches, which are 16- or 64-port machines, so the 9120 and 9140 can be said to add more granularity to an OEM’s portfolio. In any case, competition for the Brocade switches may be on features. The new products come with all the embedded tools, traffic analysis, call-home and VSAN capabilities of the bigger switches, or on price, according Zeutzius.

That said, expect to see some white-knuckle port pricing from Cisco, as it has made it clear it wants into all areas of the storage switching market, and is prepared to do what’s necessary to get there.

Source: Computerwire