11/28/2006 -- Cisco last week announced the availability of its MDS 9124 Multilayer Fabric Switch, which boasts support for VSANs, advanced security, and improved availability and flexibility. Cisco's new MDS 9124 also ships with "pay as you grow" on-demand ports and includes a new point-and-click wizard designed to simplify SAN setup and management.

Steven Schuchart, a senior analyst for enterprise infrastructure with consultancy Current Analysis, said the MDS 9124 is an important deliverable for Cisco. "[It] offers Cisco's MDS 9000 SAN-OS Software as well as pay-as-you-go port flexibility in banks of eight up to 24," he said. "The Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS Software is the same software used on the modular director-class MDS 9000 series products, providing for a simplified environment. This product also offers Cisco’s usual range of security abilities as well as VSAN."

The new MDS 9124 ships with 24 4-gigabit Fibre Channel ports and comes in a 1u form factor. Its base configuration includes eight active ports, and additional ports can be purchased in banks of eight.

It's a solid deliverable, overall, according to Schuchart. "The MDS 9124 shows Cisco's commitment to fixed configuration fabric switches and, by association, it shows Cisco's commitment to the small SAN and SMB/SME customer," he said. "In the past, Cisco has released other fabric switches, but seemed to only pay cursory attention to the market. This product shows a renewed commitment."

That goes double for the 9124's new "pay as you grow" features, he said. "[This] is clearly one of the biggest advantages of the product. This will allow customers to purchase a product and add ports as their needs grow," Schuchart said. "[Cisco's] isn't the first product on the market with this feature, as McDATA offers this, as well. Customers with other MDS 9000 series Director products will benefit from the single unified code base that the directors share with the MDS 9124. This simplifies management and ... troubleshooting."

At the same time, the market for fixed configuration Fibre Channel switches is one of the few segments in which Cisco isn't dominant. "Cisco will have to work to displace Brocade particularly in the small independent storage VAR. This challenge will be a difficult one to overcome, as many small storage VARs are dedicated to Brocade," Schuchart pointed out. "In addition, with Brocade's impending purchase of McDATA, it will have McDATA's well-received line of fabric switches to compete with Cisco, as well. While it's good that Cisco has standardized on its MDS 9000 hardware and software for the new product, customers that invested in the MDS 9020 switch that uses the FabricWare operating system will be put off. Clearly, the focus will be on the MDS 9124 in the future. Cisco only has two fixed Fibre Channel switches to offer and the MDS 9124 can be considered the ascendant product of the two."

For this reason, Schuchart calls Cisco's latest MDS deliverable a mixed bag, of sorts. "The MDS 9124 is a good product for Cisco that sews their product line up nicely, but at the end of the day will not have a huge competitive effect on the market," he concluded. "Cisco will have to put further effort into the fixed configuration fabric switch market by stint of more models in order to pose a much stronger threat to Brocade/McDATA in this product segment." -- Stephen Swoyer