Posted by : Anonymous on Aug 03, 2004 - 10:56 AM General

Cisco Systems and IBM have unveiled enhancements to the IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller for the Cisco MDS 9000, the storage area network (San) product jointly developed by the two companies.
Enhancements include support for third-party midrange storage arrays designed to help administrators roll out tiered storage architectures by moving low-activity or inactive data to lower-cost storage.

It also adds support for iSCSI connectivity through the Cisco MDS 9000 IP Storage Services Module. Previously, the product only supported devices connected through Fibre Channel protocol.

Extended support for iSCSI devices will further increase storage utilisation and data protection, the firms said.

The jointly developed San system combines the IBM SAN Volume Controller storage software embedded into a pair of Caching Services Modules for the Cisco MDS 9000 family of switches and directors.

It is designed to allow customers to administer volume management, data replication and point-in-time copies directly from the network, offering a single point of control and management across multiple storage subsystems.