Cisco and EMC to Offer End-to-End File Storage Consolidation

Enterprise Networks & Servers, Jan 2005

Cisco Systems and EMC Corp. have joined forces to provide customers with an end'to-end storage consolidation solution for remote-office data. By combining Cisco wide area file services (WAFS) technology and EMC network attached storage (NAS), customers will have an integrated solution to consolidate branch office data into the data center, allowing company-wide data to be centrally stored, managed, protected and accessed.

EMC and Cisco have agreed to develop an OEM agreement, which will enable Cisco to sell and support the EMC NS Series/Integrated NAS solutions, Cisco plans to offer these NAS solutions together with the recently introduced Cisco File Engine to provide a solution for enterprise storage consolidation over wide-area networks.

Cisco currently offers branch-office solutions for networking, security, wireless, voice, caching, and proxy services. To complement these solutions, Cisco is offering the open-standards-based Cisco File Engine series, an appliance-based solution using WAFS, an emerging technology that gives customers LAN-like performance for accessing central files from remote locations.

EMC's enterprise NAS solutions combine a Celerra network server with dedicated EMC CLARuON networked storage. The EMC NS500 Series is a system that combines simplified NAS management with integrated networked storage. The EMC NS700 Series is an integrated NAS system with dedicated networked storage. Both are available in single and dual EMC Data Mover configurations and support either Fibre Channel or ATA disk drives.

"Both Cisco and EMC are strategic vendors of data center solutions for enterprise and service provider customers globally," said Luca Cafiero, senior vice president and general manager of the Data Center, Switching, Storage and Wireless Technologies Group at Cisco.