Cisco will demonstrate 8-Gbps blades for its Fibre Channel directors at EMC World this week, but will not release its completed devices for several months.
Cisco will offer cards that support 8 Gbps for its MDS 9513, 9509 and 9506 chassis, with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) blades to follow. Although Cisco has been at the FCoE forefront, it trails rival Brocade Communications Inc. in 8 Gbps products. Brocade began shipping DCX Backbone and 4800 directors with 8 Gbps in January.
Deepak Munjal, Cisco's manager of data center marketing, said he expects Cisco's OEM storage system partners to begin shipping the 8 Gbps cards by year-end, although some OEMs probably won't qualify the cards until 2009. That means that Brocade would have an advantage of more than a year selling 8 Gbps directors through some of the major storage vendors.
According to Munjal, Cisco's advantage is that it has used the same architecture for its MDS directors since it launched the products in 2002. The 8 Gbps cards will have the same density as the company's current 4 Gbps cards, supporting up to 48 ports per card and 528 ports for the MDS 9513, 336 ports for the MDS 9509 and 192 ports for the MDS 9506. He said that customers won't have to upgrade the entire box, only the line cards.
"Unlike our competitors who come out with a new box every two years or so, the MDS has been about creating an architecture that allows it to scale at 1 gig to 8 gig and even 16 gig going forward," Munjal said. "8 gig is just a line card. We're not showing off a new chassis, new supervisor engines or anything like that."
While Brocade, which also has 8 Gbps HBAs, and HBA vendors Emulex Corp. and QLogic Corp., have raced to get 8 Gbps equipment out the door, Cisco has taken a more measured approach. Munjal said he doesn't expect storage vendors to support 8 Gbps in their disk arrays until next year. "8 gig is early to us," Munjal said. "We expect the ramp to be 2009. Our customers want to be able to upgrade, but we don't see them immediately needing to upgrade because of bandwidth."
Analyst Greg Schulz of the StorageIO Group said the timing of support for 8 Gbps among storage array vendors will determine if Cisco is late or not. "Near term in the evolving 8 gig Fibre Channel race, Brocade has to be the sure bet for now, given that Cisco has spotted them almost a year lead with product and OEM announcements," he said. "However, one of the major 8 gig Fibre Channel drivers is still missing, and that is a native 8 gig storage port on a storage system. Once that becomes available, then the market really opens up."
Munjal said Cisco plans to have FCoE cards for its directors next year. Cisco's Nexus 500 converged platform switches support FCoE but they will be used mostly for server connectivity through the end of 2009, with FCoE on storage arrays expected to ramp in volume in 2010.
Cisco also plans 8 Gbps for its MDS 9100 fabric switch platform next year. Brocade launched its 8 Gbps fabric switches last week, and they are available through IBM.