Andiamo Systems
August 2002
When did Cisco become a player in storage? Most observers would point to its acquisition of Andiamo Systems, a California startup that developed Fibre Channel switches. Cisco had invested heavily in the company a year before it pulled the trigger on an acquisition, but when plans were confirmed and Cisco came to market with a new family of storage switches almost immediately, it threw a scare into McData, Brocade and other then-leaders in the space. In the years following, Cisco continued to snap up storage and data networking companies like Actona Technologies (June 2004), NeoPath (March 2007) and Nuova Systems (April 2008). In 2009, Cisco introduced the Unified Computing System (UCS), which seeks to combine computing, storage, networking and virtualization capabilities into a single package, and whose networking knitting bears Cisco's Fibre Channel fingerprints.
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