Currently, Sprint principally uses SAN switches from Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD), along with some McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA) and Inrange Technologies Corp. (Nasdaq: INRG) equipment. "We have a very heterogeneous SAN environment, and we have no favorites," says a Sprint spokeswoman.
The company hasn't yet reached a decision about whether to deploy the Cisco MDS 9000. "Any decision to deploy will have to be backed by a very solid business case... It's not just a technology decision," Warren says.
Warren adds that he hasn't yet seen any pricing information from Cisco. "The stuff we've got, I don't know what it would sell for. The configuration we're using are all brand-new switches, but we're not paying anything for evaluation purposes."
In the next phase of its testing, Sprint will be using Veritas Software Corp.'s (Nasdaq: VRTS) software as a "management overlay" in the MDS 9000. By using the Veritas storage virtualization features, Sprint can more efficiently redeploy unused storage capacity, Warren says.
"We have probably overprovisioned storage in all our data centers," he says. "If you have a SAN in four different locations, you have storage capacity that is going unused in each of those... But if you can have those behave as a single logical SAN, you can now perhaps use the underutilized storage."
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