Many NAS vendors offer a closed file system that only attaches to dedicated internal or proprietary storage. More recently, IBM Research has collaborated with Cisco Systems to refine and extend the original idea. Cisco and IBM are committed to the same open standards and will ensure interoperability and compatibility among our products. Today's announced initiative also includes customer-focused solutions aimed at accelerating the acceptance of SANs in the marketplace. The introduction of pre-tested, plug and play storage networking packages will help businesses of all sizes more easily solve their four most critical IT issues, including consolidating, securing, preserving and sharing business data.
Customers have too many servers which prove difficult to manage.
Managing backup effectively and keeping it secure and available is critical. Business continuity must be maintained when a disaster strikes. Sharing data among applications is one of the biggest issues facing businesses today. In addition, IBM announces a range of enhancements to its SAN capabilities including native fibre channel for IBM's 3584 UltraScalable Tape Library, and a 32 gigabyte cache upgrade to IBM's Shark, bringing even greater performance, scalability and flexibility to customers' SAN implementations. Native fibre channel will enable router-less SAN connections for the eServer family, Intel, and Sun platforms.