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Tech Perspective: Cisco and Brocade

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by techperspective 1 view

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According to Gartner, network administrators have been concerned about making major investments in Cisco products due to the company's general silence on the subject of SANs. But a recent partnership between Cisco and Brocade to develop a Fibre Channel interface for Cisco's Catalyst 6000 family of switches to transport SAN traffic over IP-based networks could help. Do you trust Cisco as a "networking partner"? How do you feel now that Cisco is beginning to address SANs? What do you think of Cisco?s partnership with Brocade and its plans to push iSCSI? How do you think storage should be interconnected between and within enterprises? You can read the related Gartner article, which will be posted 3 A.M. Monday, at https://www.techrepublic.com/article.jhtml?id=r00220001127ggp01.htm.

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by junk

Overall, I trust Cisco for any networking technology. People complain about Cisco's products being slower and more expensive than their competitor's, but I think the breadth of their product line and their service contract options outweigh almost any performance deltas from competing products. This is why I almost always choose Cisco products, even for emerging technologies like IP SANs.

Also, there has been very little talk about NuSpeed (acquired by Cisco in July) and their products, butthey have an excellent technology in their hands. I believe they will emerge on the top end of iSCSI products with Cisco's backing.

I'm personally not in any hurry with deploying Fibre Channel, but I think that as always, Cisco's products will beworth the wait.

by tomiller

The answer to what standards will prevail for SANs is far from over, and one more standard added to the fray will only extend it that much longer. The bottom line that should be remembered is that a SAN is a storage area NETWORK, and Cisco has a proven track record in providing high quality, robust networks. Many network professionals are already creating isolated network segments for storage traffic, such as for backup tools that run storage loads between clients and backup servers. Adding more segments for other storage traffic will be easier than building new, independent dedicated networks for storage using new standards and technologies. The final decision may ultimately be based upon human resource availability, and there will always be more general network professionals than SAN specialists. Early SANs needed Fibre-Channel to kick-start the storage network movement, now it is time for the mainstream technologies to take a part.

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