Cisco's got its own irons in the fire. Besides working with EMC, it counts Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS), plus another application vendor it will not name, as contributors to its switch applications, which usually turn up as blades in Cisco's MDS9000 box.
Table 1: Intelligent Switch Vendors' Virtualization Partnerships
| Vendor | Virtualization Partners |
| Brocade | EMC, HP, Veritas, FalconStor, StoreAge, Alacritus (tape), Incipient |
| Cisco | EMC, HP, Veritas, IBM |
| MaXXan | FalconStor |
| McData | EMC, StoreAge |
| Byte and Switch Insider | |
All these developments have made headlines over the last few months (see Switch Showoffs Prep for Show, EMC & McData Get Smart, Veritas Finally Delivers on Cisco, and Cisco & IBM Serve Virtual Combo). But not everyone sees the SAN switch as the ideal home for virtualization (see Wisdom of Smart Switch Questioned). Among the 19 companies the report profiles in detail, including those listed elsewhere in this article, as well as DataCore Software Corp., Incipient Inc., MonoSphere Inc., Red Hat Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT), StoneFly Networks Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), and Troika Networks, makers of storage subsystems and appliances claim their wares are better than switches for virtualization.
Candera Inc. and Maranti Networks Inc., for example, offer controllers that contain purpose-built hardware they say introduces less latency into the network than switches do (see More Money for Maranti and Candera Back for Seconds).
The issues articulated and clarified in this report are being mulled by a range of SAN adopters. In a recent Byte and Switch poll, for instance, 59 percent of readers listed the SAN switch as the best place for intelligent functions such as replication to take place; 15 percent said the server, and 26 percent storage arrays.
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