Cisco Virtual SAN Technology Adopted As Industry Standard

Cisco has announced that its Cisco Virtual SAN (VSAN) technology has been selected by the Technical Committee T11 of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) for approval by the American National Standard Institute (ANSI) as the industry standard for deploying Virtual Fabrics. Virtual Fabrics allow a single, physical storage area network (SAN) fabric to be segmented into many logical, completely independent SANs.

VSAN was introduced by Cisco with the release of its Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Intelligent directors and fabric switches. Cisco first submitted VSANs to the T11 Technical Committee for consideration as an industry standard last year.

"We consider the standardization of VSAN technology to be a significant accomplishment, paralleling Cisco's pioneering efforts in the development of Virtual LAN technology as a data networking industry standard," said Tom Edsall, vice president and general manager of the Storage and Switching Technologies Group at Cisco Systems. "Just as the standardization of VLANs forever altered the landscape of data networks for the better, we expect the storage networking industry to now widely adopt VSANs to help storage administrators to build more scalable, reliable, and efficient SANs."

Cisco says that Electronic Arts (EA) has used its VSAN technology to consolidate a number of small, application-specific fabrics, or "SAN islands", onto larger fabrics. Because of the consolidation, Cisco claims, EA can now manage a shared SAN infrastructure able to support and manage multiple applications, servers, and storage devices, which lead to increased operational efficiency and lowered total cost of ownership.