As for the pricing, Roger Wofford, worldwide product marketing manager for IBM Storage Software, says: "We believe the pricing strategy will be competitive in the marketplace."
IBM says next month it will make available a new version of SAN Volume Controller software that is supposed to support disk arrays from Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) (see IBM's Big Fat File System).
But in its initial release, the CSM won't support HP or HDS storage arrays. It's Big Blue-only. Cisco's Chapman says this is because the companies wanted to provide the initial release of the module with "the most-tested version of the SVC [SAN Volume Controller] code, which was the code that IBM has deployed today." He adds, "We will sync up the releases quickly after the initial release."
Only when the CSM supports heterogeneous storage environments will it actually fulfill the promise of being able to consolidate (or "virtualize") multiple disparate storage subsystems into logical pools. The fact that it resides in the network will -- ideally -- at some point make it a much more powerful way to manage SANs, according to Cisco. "In a grid-computing scenario, this is the only way you'll want to provision storage," says Chapman.
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