Enter the dragon: how does Cisco's entrance impact the FC SAN market?

Recently, Cisco made its entry into the Fibre Channel SAN switching market by exercising its right to acquire intelligent storage switch developer Andiamo Systems. The acquisition extends from a definitive agreement inked in 2001 under which, at its closing (expected in the third quarter of Cisco's 2004 fiscal year, but no later than July 31, 2004), shares of Cisco common stock will be exchanged for all outstanding shares and options of Andiamo not already owned by Cisco. It joins market leaders Brocade and McData in what Gartner Group predicts as a $4.3 billion market by 2006. Marked as a fiercely competitive market, questions arise as to Cisco's viability in the space. Is there room for three major players? If not, what will lead to Cisco's fortune, fortitude, or failure?

The New Big Kid on the Block

The acquisition led to the unveiling of Cisco's new MDS (multi-layer data center switch) 9000 Family of multi-layer directors and fabric switches. Cisco's first offerings, the MDS 9509 multi-layer director and MDS 9216 multi-layer fabric switch (along with 16- and 32-port MDS 9000 Fibre Channel switching modules), are expected to be available in the fourth quarter of this year. MDS 9506 and 9513 multi-layer directors (along with an eight-port MDS 9000 IP Storage module) are anticipated sometime during the first half of 2003. All offer a multi-protocol/multi-transport package that includes Fibre Channel, iSCSI, FCIP, as well as future aberrations of storage protocol connectivity.

The multibillion-dollar IP networking mammoth's entry into this market isn't necessarily bad news to its current leaders. Brocade and McData are in agreement that the move justifies their existence. "Cisco obviously sees the market opportunity in Fibre Channel," commented McData senior product marketing manager Mike Tomky. "With their entry, we really see them as not only a competitor to keep our eye on, but really a major market force that has entered our market, validating that what we're doing is on the right track."

Cisco faces a few speed bumps if it expects to become the number-one or number-two player, a goal CEO John Chambers has wishfully put forth. "If you're going to knock [Brocade] off the number-one spot, you've got a lot to do," said SAN and NAS analyst Dianne McAdam of Illuminata.

Three's a Crowd 

Cisco's greatest feat may be displacing a Brocade or McData in the data center. With a commanding share of the low- to mid-size switch market, Brocade presents Cisco with one challenge while McData's hold on the high-end director-class storage space presents another. In order to fully utilize its higher-level functions, the MDS 9000 series cannot just replace a switch or director here or there, but whole competitor infrastructures. Virtual SANs (VSANs), forward congestion control, high port counts, and coordinated manageability drive the MDS 9000 series' director-class feature set.

Large, consolidated SAN infrastructures will be broken up into smaller, user-defined VSANs. These allow for contained manageability by allowing administrators to isolate a network problem within the context of a VSAN, as opposed to dealing with difficulties on a large scale.

Forward congestion control: Works a lot like getting into a trendy night club. QoS settings can be manipulated by IT to allow priority data to be hastily shipped off to its destination while lower-priority data is throttled down. In this case, the data destination is the trendy club, IT is the bouncer, high-priority data is on the VIP list, leaving everyone else (lower-priority data) waiting in line--and in the process, expediting the flow of the most crucial data.

High port counts: The MDS 9513 will offer a swollen maximum of 256 ports, far greater than McData's recently released Intrepid 6140 (140 ports) and double that of Brocade's SilkWorm 12000 (128 ports).

Coordinated manageability: Refers to the MDS series' ability to assign both IP and FC addresses to every port. In this instance, IP and storage networking coexist in one device, leaving network and storage administrators to split up management duties amongst themselves.

A rich set of high-end features indeed, but are these goodies worth the costs of full implementation?

High-Availability: McData argues availability when it comes to Cisco's new offerings. "Five-nines availability" is the sound byte in this arena and McData takes it a step further: five nines and one eight. Crucial to this 99.9998% claim is the fact that McData's products are based on a four-port module design, meaning when one card goes down, only four ports go down with it. Given Cisco's 16-and 32-port module designs, when one card goes down, between four and eight times as many ports go with it. Cisco would counter with other methods of providing high availability: fully redundant hardware, non-disruptive upgrades, and process restart to name a few.

Latency: This is another concern. McData emphasizes its non-blocking serial crossbar architecture. The architecture is such that there is a crossbar point for every port on the switch crossbar in the back of the box, and this can be scaled up for all port offerings resulting in guaranteed latency across the entire director. McData speculates that an architecture in which each switch module has a crossbar that is then linked with another crossbar (such as they foresee in Cisco's product), latency may become an issue. While few devices push full bandwidth across 2Gbit pipes, such issues may result in blocking down the line when servers get faster, 10 increases, and applications demand more bandwidth. Cisco's answer may be in its boasted 1.44Tbps of internal bandwidth--nearly two to four times the capacity of SilkWorm or Intrepid's 256Gbps.

How Do We Sell This Thing?

Cool new features and specs aside, how does Cisco intend to sell its new line? From its sales team to customer support, it will need to learn storage lingo in order to begin to attempt rooting out Brocade and McData's firmly planted installed base. "Cisco's got to go in there and convince customers to take Out the 15 or 20 Brocade switches that they own and replace them with Cisco," pointed out McAdam. "That's going to be a big investment for customers when they've got something that already works."

This places customer and subsystem vendor relationships at a premium. Ed Chapman of Cisco's product marketing, Storage Technology Group says that although those higher-level functions may only be available in a homogenous Cisco storage network, users will still have the ability to replace single switches within a system. Interoperability will be provided based on current standards that will enable this. Beyond standard interoperability, though, Cisco will deploy their products through subsystem vendors. In this instance, the MDS line will be sold through vendors as part of an end-to-end solution giving Cisco the ability to sell its products just as much as anybody else.

There could be a problem in this business model, though. Primarily selling directly to high-end customers, Cisco could create a conflict of interest selling direct while also through a vendor to the same clients. "Let's say Cisco convinced one of these companies to OEM their product. Cisco sells 10 of them to a customer. Why does that customer ever have to buy the 11th one from the OEM when Cisco's got a direct selling relationship with them already?" asked Camden Ford, Brocade's senior product marketing manager.

Taking a step out of the box itself, other blips may pop up on Cisco's radar. "You want a storage network, Mario Mazzola [Cisco's chief development officer] will sell you an IP switch. If you need to have a gall-bladder operation, Mario Mazzola will sell you an IP switch. These are IP switch guys," Ford joked. Not far from the truth, the MDS 9000 family will offer the ability to assign IP and FC addresses to every port, allowing units to be managed from either a storage or IP networking perspective.

It is this kind of interoperability that leads Ford to speculate that Cisco's intent may solely be to replace its Catalyst 6500 series switches in the IP networking space. "The Andiamo acquisition may in fact be a way to make Mario Mazzola, and all his buddies that got special Andiamo stock, a lot of money to build a replacement for the Catalyst 6500. It may be a very successful company and people may make a lot of money, but they may never sell product one into storage."

The Second Coming of Network Evolution

Cisco reveals a roadmap similar to the evolution of the IP network. Chapman recalls the humble beginnings of the LAN, devoid of scalability, network services, or any real intelligence features, back in the late 1980s. Several years (and billions of dollars) later, 50-100 workstation environments have soared to networks of up to 150,000 nodes offering scalability, manageability, and performance for workgroups, campuses, enterprises, and international organizations. Will the storage network follow a similar path? Cisco's banking on it.

"We see there's a real need in terms of providing services or functionality and scalability in storage area networking solutions that allow us to expand the scope of those capabilities and really provide true economies of scale in both an ROI and TCO perspective to our customers," said Chapman.

There's a Let in a Name

One of Cisco's greatest assets and hindrances is its reputation. In doing a side-by-side comparison of all the players in this space, Cisco has the most recognizable name. Top-level decision makers may find the name more comforting than any technology could ever be. However, this name has been made in a different breed of technology. The question becomes: Will Cisco offer the comfort of trying the pasta at your favorite pizza joint or the uneasiness of Chinese take-out from that same place? The answer may lie in how hungry the industry is.

Whatever the case, the Fibre Channel SAN market welcomes its newest player: "We think it elevates the importance of storage networking at the corporate level, all the way to the CIO and the CEO because this is a major announcement by a major technology partner to many of these companies," said Ford. "Cisco's now out there carrying the torch for SANs and that raises the visibility for all of us."

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