EMC, Cisco Do the Deed

At long last, EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) has inked a deal with Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) to resell Cisco's MDS 9000 series of SAN switches, and Hopkinton says it's also planning to port certain storage management applications to run on the switches (see EMC to Resell Cisco MDS 9000).

The EMC-Cisco deal has been anticipated for months, and represents the last major agreement Cisco wanted to secure in its foray into the storage networking market. The company already has similar reseller deals with IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) (see Cisco and EMC Edge Closer, EMC Holds Off on Cisco, Cisco Gets Set, HP Refills Its SAN Flask, and IBM Tells Cisco: 'Let's Go!').

"It's the completion of our go-to-market strategy," Luca Cafiero, senior VP and general manager of Cisco's Switching, Voice, and Storage Technology Group, told Byte and Switch in an interview today.

Beginning later this quarter, EMC will resell the Cisco switches under its Connetrix line and next month they will be qualified as E-Lab Tested by EMC and added to EMC's support matrix. Pricing information was not announced. EMC says it has been testing the Cisco switches for interoperability with its Symmetrix and Clariion storage systems since September 2002.

In a unique provision, the switches themselves will be cobranded both EMC and Cisco. David Goulden, EMC's executive VP of global marketing and new business development, compares this to the arrangement EMC has with Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL) on the Clariion line of storage arrays.Goulden says the features of the MDS 9000 that EMC is "very excited" about are that it's a multiprotocol switch -- with support for Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over IP, and iSCSI -- and so it is well suited for customers who are looking to merge their storage infrastructures with IP networking. He also points to Cisco's Virtual SAN (VSAN) and management modules as standout features.

EMC's ControlCenter management software will support the Cisco MDS 9000 family -- and beyond that, EMC will port certain of its storage applications to run on the "intelligent" applications module, about which Cisco has not furnished many details.

"Storage networks are not too intelligent today," Goulden says. "That's where the new intelligence will be added incrementally." Neither EMC nor Cisco would say when these "intelligent" features will be available, but Goulden says the applications will include path optimization and data classification.

EMC and Cisco also plan to define an industry standard -- which they expect to submit to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) -- for application programming interfaces (APIs) to intelligent switches.

There had been some speculative chatter in the industry that EMC would certify Cisco's SAN switches but not resell them. Today's announcement, however, not only shows EMC will resell the switches but also that the two companies are engaging in broader codevelopment projects. EMC currently resells switches from both Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) and McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA), the two leading SAN switch vendors today. [Ed. note: Perhaps only until Cisco really starts sinking its teeth into this market?]But why did it take practically nine months for EMC to put the MDS switches through their paces? EMC is very careful. Goulden maintains that the certification timeframe is "fairly typical for a new product," adding that EMC has been pleased with how the MDS 9000 has performed in the lab.

Cisco, meanwhile, says there were only minor fixes necessary in the MDS 9000 switches to pass EMC's certification. "There was a misspelling in the CLI [command line interface]," says Cafiero by way of example. [Ed. note: If the misspelling was "Clariion," we can fully sympathize.]

Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch