Cisco and Brocade collaborate on Sans

Networking giant Cisco has signed a deal with fibre channel company Brocade Communications to develop ways of allowing disparate storage area networks (Sans) to communicate with each other.

Greg Reyes, chief executive at Brocade, said: "This agreement will result in products that will provide seamless connectivity of Brocade based Sans over Cisco's networking infrastructure, and offer our customers the ability to interconnect them across their existing metropolitan and wide area networks."

Initially, the two companies will develop a fibre channel interface for Cisco's Catalyst 6000 line of multi-layer switches. The partners will target metropolitan area networks by linking together Brocade's SilkWorm fibre channel fabric switches with Cisco's dense wavelength division multiplexing products. Additional switch-to-switch connection products are expected in the future.

Reyes claimed that the connection of disparate Sans will allow sites to use applications that were only previously available within local area networks. "We believe that the results of this relationship will enable the development of new classes of applications and service offerings including disaster recovery, remote data replication, remote data backup and digital content distribution," he said.

Fibre channel transmits data at rates of up to 1Gbps - three times faster than current SCSI technologies which it is expected to replace as the transmission interface between servers and clustered storage devices.