Cisco, meanwhile, still won't say when the Veritas-enabled features will be available on the MDS 9000. Veritas has previously announced that it will port several of its products to the Andiamo platform, including SANPoint Control, which offers centralized management of heterogeneous SANs, Veritas Cluster Server, Veritas Foundation Suite, and NetBackup (see Veritas Supports Cisco MDS 9000).
In addition, Sprint will be replicating data over iSCSI using the MDS 9000's optional IP module. The carrier will send data between its facilities in Burlingame, Calif., and Kansas City, Mo., using iSCSI over a DWDM (dense wavelength-division multiplexing) connection. According to Cisco, the eight-port MDS 9000 IP storage module, which supports both iSCSI and Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) protocols, is expected to be available in the first half of 2003.
Sprint expects to wrap up its evaluation testing just as Cisco readies its initial entry into the Fibre Channel market. IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) is planning to ship MDS 9000 switches later this month, and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) have announced their intentions to start selling the Cisco gear in a similar timeframe (see Cisco Gets Set, Cisco Makes SAN Software Friends, HDS Certifies Cisco MDS 9000, and IBM Tells Cisco: 'Let's Go!').
The generally positive feedback from Sprint matches the reaction Cisco is getting from others -- including Texas power company Reliant Energy -- that have taken early looks at the Andiamo switches (see Cisco Beta Site: 'We Love It!').
Robert Montague, analyst at RBC Capital Markets, says interviews with several enterprise users his team has contacted (unfortunately, he won't say who those end users are) indicate a welcome reception for the new Cisco switches. The Cisco Fibre Channel gear, he notes, offers features not offered by Brocade or McData, including Virtual SANs (VSANs) and the switched port analyzer (SPAN) feature. SPAN provides a real-time, out-of-band protocol analysis of the traffic between two ports in an MDS switch, while VSANs allow multiple virtual (logical) SANs to run on the same physical infrastructure (see Cisco's VSANs: Hype or Innovation?).
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