"We have not seen rip-and-replace deployments," he says. [Ed. note: No ready-to-wear deployments, either, we presume.]
But what about the skepticism of some industry observers who say HP and other OEMs will be reluctant to push Cisco's SAN gear? Nonsense, says Archibald: "You can see by the field engagement and our pricing that that is certainly not the case for HP. We really are trying to take the approach that since we have all three switches in our portfolio, we're going to provide the solution that best meets a customer's needs."
The Cisco switch is the best fit for a mixed-protocol environment, Archibald says. "We think they have a lead on integrating IP into a Fibre Channel environment," he says. For the MDS 9509, Cisco offers an IP storage services module that can support both iSCSI and Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) simultaneously on each of eight Gigabit Ethernet ports (see Cisco Implants IP in SANs).
Archibald says HP did find some performance issues with the MDS 9000 switches early on, some of which had to do with timing between HP's arrays and the switches. But he says HP encountered nothing as serious as the out-of-order and dropped frame issues that Brocade alleges have been affecting the Cisco boxes (see Brocade & Cisco: Who's Out of Order?).
"Some of these issues were subtleties in the Fibre Channel protocol, and we worked with them to understand the way we've interpreted them and how we work with each other," he says. "They fixed the issues -- otherwise we wouldn't be shipping the product."
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