Cisco Unveils SAN Products Targeted At Disaster Recovery
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Cisco Systems unveiled two SAN products that it says will help companies evade or recover quickly from disasters affecting corporate data.
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Storage powerhouses Hewlett-Packard Co. and QLogic Corp. have created an easy-to-use SAN-in-a-box product targeted at small and midsize businesses.
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IBM and Cisco Systems have unveiled product updates that will tie technology from the two companies more closely together in an effort to secure customer networks from worms and viruses.
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IT managers concerned about deploying blade technology into heterogeneous environments may have an easier time of it with the recent announcement that Brocade&#39;s SAN (storage area network
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Perfigo's products will fit into Cisco's security architecture that combines virus scanning with network policing.
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As servers and storage start to merge into unified, virtualized systems, Cisco wants to do the same thing with the networks that connect them.On Monday, the company is set to unveil a datacenter networking platform that eventually could take the place of both the Ethernet switches that link servers as well as the Fibre Channel devices that form storage networks. The Nexus series is designed both to meet exploding demands for bandwidth and energy efficiency within data centers and to simplify the jobs of IT administrators. In the process, it could help give Cisco the central role it seeks in IT infrastructure.Cisco is already a leading player in datacenter networks with its&#160;Catalyst series Ethernet switches&#160;and its MDS storage network platform. Now it hopes to transcend those separate systems using a single, unified switching fabric and the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard. The platform it will use, called Nexus, will be a line of routing switches in chassis, rack-mounted and blade form. The first of these, the Nexus 7000 chassis, will be generally available in the second quarter. Prices will start at $75,000, but a typical configuration will cost about $200,000, according to Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco&#39;s Data Center, Switching and Security Technology Group.Mark Drake is looking at the Nexus platform for future-proofing as his company, Health Management Associates, centralizes its data resources. The company runs about 60 hospitals, mostly in the Southeastern U.S. Health Management&#39;s current Catalyst switches are probably enough to handle connectivity needs in its data centers for the next two years, but it&#39;s hard to predict storage and processing requirements beyond that as he looks for the next generation, Drake said.&quot;I&#39;m looking at a little over ten years&#39; capacity,&quot; Drake said. The Nexus line is built to go far beyond the scale of the Catalysts, delivering more than 15Tbps. &quot;The capacity to grow is huge,&quot; he said.Another benefit Drake sees in the Nexus, which he has been told about but hasn&#39;t tested, is ease of management. Health Management is already trying to reduce IT staff costs by consolidating data centers from each hospital to a two main locations. Because the new platform combines storage and data switching along with security in a single switch and management interface, it could further simplify running those datacenters, he said.Initially, Cisco sees the Nexus switches at the core of datacenters that still use separate networks for processing and storage. But as FCoE emerges in storage systems, the Nexus could become the single connectivity platform, Ullal said. Its switching fabric is designed to be lossless, unlike a standard Ethernet system, which tolerates dropped packets, said Tom Edsall, senior vice president and CTO of the data center group. The platform also has built-in security features, including wire-speed encryption and authentication capability for each port.At the heart of the platform is a new, virtualized operating system, NX OS. As with server virtualization, NX OS can turn a Nexus switch into multiple logical switches running totally different processes, Ullal said . For example, one logical switch could handle storage and be managed by storage specialists, while the other links servers and is run by a different staff. A third could be a test platform. All would use a single switching fabric and set of redundant power supplies, which provides benefits in performance, economies of scale, and resiliency, she said. This virtualized architecture eventually will trickle down to other Cisco product lines, according to Ullal.Cisco also has automated some aspects of management with the Nexus line, drawing on best practices it learned partly from its customers, Edsall said. The system is designed to monitor and heal itself in many cases.The network&#39;s role in datacenters is growing as computing and storage are combined and shared, according to industry analysts. It&#39;s now the &quot;orchestrator&quot; of the datacenter, Zeus Kerravala of Yankee Group said. Cisco is the only vendor with both the networking and the computing experience to fulfill that role, he believes. But though many managers of datacenters want to see total virtualization of the datacenter, which could boost efficiency, they aren&#39;t yet ready for it.&quot;We&#39;re just entering the very early stages of the virtual datacenter,&quot; Kerravala said. &quot;This is probably at least two years away.&quot;Cisco is best positioned to build the core of datacenters because the network touches everything in it, according to Ullal, Edsall, and other executives.&quot;For Cisco, it&#39;s very critical that this platform be a launching pad to go further up the IT stack,&quot; said IDC&#39;s Cindy Borovick. However, taking control of datacenters won&#39;t be a walk in the park, she cautioned.&quot;Cisco&#39;s in a very strong position, but there are other very large suppliers that recognize how important the datacenter is and are willing to invest the R&amp;D dollars,&quot; Borovick said, citing IBM and Sun Microsystems. To Cisco&#39;s peril, datacenter administrators are more than willing to buy the best of many vendors rather than standardize on one, because they control the &quot;crown jewels&quot; of the enterprise, she said.
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Microsoft and Cisco Systems today said they will share security and network health technologies in an effort to stop, isolate and eliminate viruses and other malicious software on Windows-based networks.
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SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Cisco Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO - News) announced today the availability of a suite of new CiscoÂ® CatalystÂ® switching products and services specifically designed and priced for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems and Microsoft will announce progress on a 2-year-old effort to link their separate technologies for network client health screening, commonly known as "network access control," according to sources familiar with the companies' plans.Â  The companies will use The Security Standard conference in Boston to unveil application program interfaces (APIs) in Microsoft's upcoming Vista operating system that will allow Cisco NAC-compliant switches and routers to evaluate the security posture of Vista systems. Network access control technology allows companies to perform health checks on endpoint devices such as PCs and mobile devices before they are granted access to company networks. For example, worker PCs might be checked to make sure they are not infected with a virus, have up-to-date antivirus definitions, and a desktop firewall enabled before being allowed onto a corporate LAN. Cisco first unveiled products that support its NAC architecture in June 2004. Since then it has slowly expanded NAC support from routers to switches and introduced a NAC appliance, formerly known as "Clean Access." Microsoft's Network Admission Protection (NAP) client health screening architecture has always been linked to its upcoming desktop and server operating system releases Vista and Longhorn, both due in 2007. In the face of strong customer pressure to simplify the competing architectures, the two companies said in October, 2004 that they would integrate NAC and NAP. However, the companies have been sparing with details of the collaboration during the two-year project, prompting speculation that the promised integration was more PR than reality. On Wednesday, the companies plan to show that they have made progress, putting features into Vista that allow companies with Cisco's Secure Access Control Server (ACS), Vista desktop systems, and a Longhorn network policy server to provide security status information from the Vista Security Center directly to Cisco switches, which can then evaluate the status against network policies. Systems that violate one or more security policies can be shunted off to quarantine for remediation, according to John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner who has seen a demonstration of the system. The system will also allow companies to push out security updates, such as antivirus signatures, and actively monitor compliance, so users who turn off antivirus or firewall software after being granted access might have those programs automatically reactivated, Pescatore said. Cisco NAC and Microsoft NAP integration will make it easier for companies to deploy NAC technology, because they will not need to deploy any additional software client from Cisco, as is currently required, he said. "If you're a pure Cisco network and windows environment, and you're planning to go to Vista soon, you don't have to spend a lot of money," he said. However, the benefits of integrated NAC and NAP are at least a year away, as companies will have to wait for the delivery of Longhorn server and widespread adoption of Vista on enterprise desktops, according to Pescatore. "I think it's a 1990s announcement," said Jon Oltsik, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "They're treating the symptom but not the disease. Users want open solutions that support Linux clients and wireless and any kind of switch or router," he said. The integration between Microsoft and Cisco, while good for those companies, will hinder open standards efforts like the Trusted Computing Group's Trusted Network Connect (TNC) standard, Oltsik said. "I wish I had the money [Cisco and Microsoft] spent on this to get nothing," he said. "This is a big step back for client security."
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Cisco Systems' Linksys division rolls out its first network-attached storage for businesses.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems's Linksys division thinks SMBs should have some of the same features enterprises get, such as backup power and virtualization, when they attach storage to their networks. On Monday, the company rolled out its first NAS products for businesses, filling a need it found in smaller organizations when it started investigating the technology about two years ago, said Ivor Diedricks, a senior product marketing manager. The rollout includes two lines of NAS chassis, ranging in price from $999.99 to $2,499.99. NAS is common in enterprises and a fledgling category in consumer electronics, but neither of those types of gear suits enterprises with between five and 100 users, Diedricks said. The company's goal was to key capabilities of the large-enterprise systems into products that are affordable to SMBs. Linksys' well-known parent also serves some enterprises in that five-to-100-user range, Diedricks said. But those companies generally have an in-house IT staff and want a direct support relationship with Cisco, whereas Linksys customers generally turn to resellers for management and support. The NAS products are available with an optional redundant power supply unit to keep the NAS units running in case of a power outage as well as standard on-disk encryption, a system within the chassis for encrypting data. With on-disk encryption, disks can be taken out and moved, and the data will stay secure, Diedricks said. Linksys introduced four NSS (Network Storage System) chassis, each with four drive bays. The NSS6000 includes some advanced features that are not in the NSS4000, notably virtualization capability, Diedricks said. This feature lets a business organize more than one NAS chassis into a single virtual volume. An NSS4000 can be part of one of these virtual volumes, but the NSS6000 is required to run virtualization. Also, the NSS6000 can handle 75 simultaneous users, while the NSS4000 is limited to 15. Both the NSS4000 and NSS6000 also are available in versions that already include a set of 250GB RAID drives for a total capacity of 1TB. Also Monday, Linksys introduced its first stackable switches for SMBs. The devices are designed to help enterprises expand their networks as they grow. As many as eight can be stacked together and managed as one switch, and an optional redundant power supply can keep a stack of as many as six running in case of an outage. The switches range from a 24-port 10/100M bps device with four Gigabit Ethernet ports and two interfaces for fiber Gigabit links to an all-Gigabit Ethernet switch with four fiber interfaces and Power over Ethernet to run VoIP phones and other devices. They all have quality-of-service features to support VoIP. Estimated street prices range from $409.99 to $999.99.
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BOSTON - Networking equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. warned customers about security holes in two products that provide user authentication and authorization services for network devices such as firewalls and routers.
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Cisco Systems used the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco to trumpet its transformation from "packet pusher" to "infrastructure" company, unveiling a string of product updates that unify its diverse security portfolio on Monday.
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CLEVELAND, Sept. 18  /PRNewswire/ -- More businessmen throughout the nation can now save money on data recovery disaster systems and also worry less about their reliability thanks to an online backup data retrieval product solution being launched by United Computer Group, Inc.
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The Netops collection of Perl scripts use SNMP to manage devices -- upgrading operating systems, modifying configuration files, and producing reports. They tend to be Cisco and APC centric.   Enhanced APC calibration support, added Tipping Point IPS support, various switch interface reports
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Cisco Systems has added two products to its award-winning Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Intelligent directors and fabric switches optimized for transporting storage area network (SAN) traffic outside of the data center, which make them ideally
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(Source: Network Appliance) This independent study by Mercer Management Consulting was designed to identify what drives total cost in Exchange storage environments and how EMC, HP and Network Appliance storage area network (SAN) solutions compare in these environments. Download this white paper to review their findings.