EMC, Cisco Strike Reseller Agreement

EMC and Cisco Systems
expanded their partnership Tuesday, with the Hopkinton,
Mass. storage firm agreeing to resell
the Cisco
MDS 9000 multilayer directors and fabric switches.

Financial details for the agreement were not revealed, but the news firmly
places the MDS 900 family, launched after San Jose, Calif.’s Cisco acquired
Andiamo last August, into the limelight. It is a sure win over rival switch
makers Brocade and McData in the market to make products that filter
and forward packets between local area networks. Moreover, the switches are
already being resold by
IBM.

The MDS 9509 Multilayer Director and MDS 9216 Multilayer Fabric Switch offer
several networking and storage interfaces, including Fibre Channel
connectivity as well as capabilities for iSCSI and FCIP connectivity.

EMC, who in the co-branding deal will sell the Cisco products as part of its
Connectrix
SAN line, also pledged to write software applications hosted on the MDS
9000 platform to integrate EMC’s storage management, path optimization and
data classification with Cisco’s security and traffic management services.

Meanwhile, Cisco will provide technical support to EMC to accelerate EMC
ControlCenter integration and development of network-hosted open storage
applications on the Cisco MDS 9000 family. The Cisco MDS 9000 line will be
available from EMC this quarter.

EMC and Cisco have hooked up on various infrastructure projects for more
than four years. Cisco is EMC’s leading network infrastructure partner; EMC
is a leading storage partner in Cisco’s Storage Networking and AVVID
(Architecture for Voice,
Video, and Integrated Data) Partner Program initiatives.

This story originally appeared on Internet News.

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