Quoting from idm.net.au

Speaking yesterday at a press briefing held jointly with EMC in Sydney, Cisco's IT infrastructure director for data centre systems, Brian Christensen, told IDM that a formalised development agreement exists between the two organisations with virtualisation of storage forming a strong link. EMC's Invista, which runs within Cisco switches, was used as a prime example.

Elsewhere, Christensen spoke about Cisco's 'Service Orientated Network Architecture' (SONA). "Cisco is not just providing connectivity, it is also enabling applications", was the strong message. Christensen pointed out that, although storage, "has been the focus since 2001, SONA has been in development for the last three years." During those three years, having 'got into the SAN world' Cisco has also managed a 35% increase in its own storage utilisation.

Christensen was also keen to explain that Cisco has a been able to achieve a US$300-million saving from retooling its own global data centres - and the 4-petabytes of storage therein - to become Service Orientated Data Centres. This enabled him to make a bullish statement in relation to his company's grasp of storage over IP, "People come and talk to Cisco (because) the network is the thing that touches everything".

Core to SONA is the use of both server and storage virtualisation to deliver holistic IT services from hardware and bandwidth provisioning to application automation using the network as the key enabler. The concentration on virtualising environments, however, did not result in any mention of Cisco's recent investment in NeoPath Networks which makes storage virtualisation software, most notably, FileDirector.

While Christensen lauded EMC's Rainfinity and Invista virtualisation offerings, Cisco was also investing in NeoPath's storage virtualisation solutions. In fact, US media sites are quoting Cisco in relation to its part in a US$11-million funding round to Neopath.

According to several outlets, the company is quoted as saying that, "Cisco thinks NeoPath has a strong storage migration tool, which is getting traction in the market. In addition, we are interested in their vision for virtualization in the Network Attached Storage space and in how this space develops"

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