As customers continue to look for points of differentiation in their markets, the Storage Area Network (SAN) continues to play a vital role in enabling businesses to adopt new technologies and applications to help them grow. To provide the highest reliability, scalability, and performance, organizations have traditionally deployed Fibre Channel (FC) storage networks and many will continue to do so. FC is still a preferred choice for enterprises (large and small), and the market transition from 4/8 G to 16 G is the best proof that the FC market is still strong. Ethernet-based Storage solutions are also gaining mindshare and some of our customers desiring a unified data center fabric use Ethernet-based Storage protocols to reap the benefit of convergence.
We are sometimes asked about how Cisco MDS products will support the latest generation of storage technology on the market, namely flash. Industry influencers have asked us if SAN technology will continue to be relevant as these newer memory technologies gain market share. Can SAN technology cope with the increased performance and workload consolidation enabled by flash-based arrays?
Our answer is a resounding "Yes":SAN solutions are here to stay. No matter the underlying storage components, it is still very important for customers to be able to manage enterprise-level storage requirements centrally, and to optimize storage delivery. Cisco is committed to working with third-parties to ensure that our MDS SAN technology interoperates with leading edge storage technology, and we have certification programs in place to ensure smooth deployments for customers.
The most recent example of this industry collaboration is with Nimble. To support varying storage requirements, Nimble on Nov 18thannounced its support for FC SAN on their Adaptive Flash platform; now customers have the choice of iSCSI Ethernet-based storage or FC. Unique application requirements lead to application specific infrastructure needs and Cisco, along with Nimble, provideover 450 joint customerswith differentiated solutions tailored to address customer needs.
Highlights of announcement
Why Nimble + Cisco MDS solution?
Cisco Storage Ecosystem
Cisco MDS is an open , flexible and standards based platform, integrates well with a wide variety of storage systems including Nimble. Cisco along with its partners enable customers to realize the full value of IT investments faster.
Cisco and our Partners help to:
Bottom Line
To provide highest reliability, scalability, and performance, organizations have traditionally deployed Fibre Channel storage networks. Nimble with this announcement, provide enterprise customers with more options -customers can now deploy Ethernet based or FC based storage, based on their storage requirements.
Cisco provides anOpen, Flexible and Standardsbased platform and integrates well with Nimble and other FC and Ethernet based storage systems.
For more info:
Tony Antony
Sr Marketing Manager