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Cisco Spills Beans on Next SAN Router: Page 3 of 4

“We will build more products with FC ports and there will be an overlap with our partners, but how far this goes depends on which direction they go in -- and we do not have Brocade’s roadmap... Cisco’s plan is to be agnostic to the media and protocols and give customers whatever connectivity options they need.”

Meantime, the long-awaited FC blade for the Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 7500 routers, developed in conjunction with Brocade, is expected by year's end. This will connect islands of Fibre Channel SANs over Ethernet by encapsulating FC in IP. Cree confirmed rollout of the blade is on schedule.

What will become of the partnership after this, remains to be seen.

Cree believes that the uptake of IP storage in big data centers will not take off until 10-Gbit/s Ethernet hits the market. “There are lots of startups developing products here, but it’s going to take two to three years to get into these and then a couple of years after that before it really takes off."

There are a couple of markets Cisco isn’t too hot on. Namely InfiniBand, which it continues to watch, although Cree says the company isn't clear on InfiniBand's message. “We don’t know if it’s a PCI bus replacement or a server clustering technology -- and neither does the market."