Cisco gets aggressive on IP storage

Sanjay Kharade Regional Manager, System Engineering, Enterprise-West, Cisco Systems (India)

Cisco Systems is bullish about Internet Protocol (IP) SAN storage becoming popular amongst enterprises in India. It is hopeful that the huge cost differential between IP-SANs and Fibre Channel (FC) SANs will drive enterprises to go in for IP-based storage. Sanjay Kharade, regional manager-System Engineering, Enterprise-West, Cisco Systems (India) says, “IP Ethernet speed has shown an increase from 10/100 to Gigabyte at the desktop-level. We have also included SSH (Shell Secure), RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Server/Service) and Role Based Access Control against unauthorised management access in our IP SAN switches”.

He says that unlike IP, FC cannot be easily transported over lower bandwidth [typically FC would required a bandwidth of 1 Gbps] long distance networks in its native form and therefore requires special gateway hardware and protocols. IP network infrastructure provides major advantages for interconnection of servers to block-oriented storage devices and also has enhanced security, scalability, interoperability and network management over a traditional FC network. In order to tap the potential in the IP storage space, Cisco Systems has introduced SAN switches, which have modular capabilities and can support multiple protocols such as IP, FC, FC-IP and iSCSI.

Abhinav Singh