Playing high stakes poker with your storage strategy?
Any storage professional in an enterprise data center knows that when buying a storage-area network (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS), you typically first work through a storage vendor like EMC Corp. or Network Appliance Inc. The idea that one would first bring a networking vendor such as Brocade Communications Systems Inc. or Cisco Communications Inc. to the table to discuss strategic storage problems seems anathema.
This acquisition brings Cisco more directly into the storage conversation. If needing to consolidate and virtualize files across multiple NAS heads, suddenly it’s Cisco’s engineers leading the file-consolidation discussion, not EMC’s or NetApp’s.
This acquisition also brings Cisco directly into competition with companies whose products it had carefully avoided competing against. For instance, Cisco’s MDS9000’s Storage Service Module (SSM) switch complemented other storage vendor’s virtualization offerings by allowing them to install and run their software on Cisco’s Fibre Channel directors without directly competing against them.
What does this mean for the Cisco NetApp partnership?
