The partnership between IBM and Ciscocontinues to pay
dividends. The companies added support for mid-range arrays from Hitachi Data Systems, EMC
and HPfor their joint storage virtualization device.
IBMofficials said third-party support for the IBM
TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) for the Cisco MDS 9000 product
was added to help customers with mixed gear move seldom-used data into a
tiered system of lower cost storage.
The enhanced device helps virtualize or pool resources from different
machines for access through one console. With it, users can exact volume,
management, data replication, and point-in-time copies from the network,
giving them a single point of control for several storage systems.
Jeff Barnett, manager of storage software strategy at IBM, said the SVC for
the MDS 9000 also now features iSCSIconnectivity to serve
low-cost environments. Previously, the product only supported devices
connected through Fibre Channelstorage.
“It provides more flexibility,” Barnett told internetnews.com. “In
their primary data center most customers today are likely fibre
channel-based, but you may have some servers that you’d like to have
leveraging your pool of storage.”
The product consists of storage software from SVC, which is embedded into a
pair of caching services modules for the Cisco MDS 9000 switches and
directors, to provide high availability and performance on storage networks.
While it might seem strange that IBM would support products from its rivals,
the Armonk, N.Y. company believes that providing customers with more choice
will ultimately sway them to buy IBM FastT mid-range or Shark TotalStorage
Enterprise Storage Server systems.
It is also likely a necessity at a time when EMC is helping customers
shuttle inactive data to less expensive storage media with its information
lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. The end goal is to help customers curb
the costs and complexity of managing data on computer networks. EMC also is
girding for battle with IBM and HP on the virtualization front, planning
a storage router for mid-2005.
The new progress is hardly a stretch for IBM, which made a similar release last April, when it made the SVC compatible with EMC’s
Clariion and Symmetrix lines. SVC already supported HP
and HDSsystems.
But Monday’s news marks the first time Big Blue has worked with Cisco to
create interoperability within a joint product for alien arrays.