Cisco Intros Its First Pay-as-you-grow SAN Switch

Cisco's new MDS 9124 will have another impact on the channel: silencing some of the rumors that Cisco is looking to acquire QLogic in order to improve its competitiveness against the new upcoming Brocade/McData combination.

With the MDS 9124 there's no need for Cisco to buy QLogic, said Mike Fanelli, president of TreTempo, a Dallas-based solution provider.

"Why should they now?" Fanelli said. "The have the product. If they were going to buy QLogic, they would've done it before they brought out the new switch."

The MDS 9124 fits a 1U rackmount space, and can be deployed either as part of a standalone SAN for s specific purpose such as e-mail, or at the edge of a SAN in order to consolidate storage devices in remote offices, or as part of a wide-area network (WAN) for disaster recovery purposes, Bhardwaj said.

For smaller businesses, the switch can be installed in three steps, including configuring the IP address, using a browser to connect to the switch, and launching a quick configuration wizard, Bhardwaj said. The switch then auto-discovers all storage elements on a SAN and sets up the appropriate connections, he said.

The switch also comes with Cisco's SAN-OS software, which offers such security elements as an audit trail to show all changes in the SAN, securing of passwords on an external server, and hardware-enforced zoning, he said.

Cisco sells the bulk of its Fibre Channel switches through system and storage vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, EMC and Network Appliances which in turn sell them through their direct and indirect sales channels.

The new switches, which are scheduled to ship in December at an as-yet undetermined price, come with Cisco's channel outreach programs. This includes a newsletter, up to two hours of training for solution providers' account managers and up to one day for systems engineers, backend rebates, low-cost demo units, and information about how to explain SANs to customers, Chitre said.