Zardon

CISCO SYSTEMS AND IBM today announced that the latter would begin reselling Cisco's storage director and switch by the end of the first quarter 2003.

The resell agreement is non-exclusive and is the first publicly announced agreement Cisco has made in regards to its MDS family of products. The agreement will initially have IBM reselling the MDS 9509 and 9216 as well as the accompanying modules.

According to Roland Hagan, a vice president of marketing in Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM's systems group, the switch and director products are being qualified for interoperability now with IBM's existing tape and disc-based products and will be available before the end of the first quarter.

Hagan anticipates the products to be sold in the same way IBM currently sells switches from its other partners, including Brocade, McData, and Inrange.

Hagan added that pricing and terms of availability will be disclosed around the announcement of the product's shipment. He believes IBM will be the first to market with Cisco storage products.

Soni Jiandani, vice president of marketing of Cisco' storage group, explained this is an important milestone for Cisco, based in San Jose, Calif.

"Our goal was to make sure we worked with and evolved our existing partnerships," Jiandani said. "Our goal now is to focus on a handful of partners the likes of IBM."

Those potential partners were classified as storage SANs and subsystem providers and system integrators.

In addition to the nine-slot 9509 switch and the 16-slot 9216 director switch, Cisco's MDS family also includes the 9506 and the 9513, six and 13-slot switches, respectively.

Also making an agreement announcement today was Brocade and StorageTek. The terms of the agreement have StorageTek offering maintenance support on the entire family of Brocade products as well as professional services to Brocade's SAN customers. Scott Tyler Shafer