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Veritas Finally Delivers on Cisco: Page 2 of 4

"This gives Cisco first-mover advantage in getting it into the market faster than its competitors," says Yankee Group senior analyst Jaime Gruener. "It raises a question about what the other storage [switch] vendors are doing."

Those other storage switch vendors include Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD), Computer Network Technology Corp. (CNT) (Nasdaq: CMNT), and McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA). Veritas plans to ship VSFN with Brocade switches, but that probably won't happen until late 2004, according to Veritas.

Cisco also has another dance partner on this front: IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) last month announced it will ship its SAN Volume Controller on Cisco switches next month. However, IBM's software runs on Cisco's Caching Service Module and doesn't take advantage of port-level processing as does Veritas's software, which runs on the Application Service Module (see IBM, Cisco Team on Storage Virtualization).

Veritas says the new software is designed to work with its Veritas SANPoint Control to help users manage multivendor storage networks. Pricing for the VSFN enterprise version starts at $1,000 per host bus adapter (HBA) and Storage Controller port.

"This was designed from the ground up with Cisco -- we're writing right on the data path," says Jose Iglesias, VP of integrated platforms at Veritas. "We took the Volume Manager from the host and brought it to the switch."