SAN JOSE, USA: Cisco and IBM have partnered to offer enhanced capabilities to its data centre portfolio for wide area comminications for storage area network (SAN) users.

The new capabilities would enhance security and accelerate data traffic over greater distance for IBM z/OS mainframe users of Global Mirror, a business continuity and disaster recovery replication product.

By improving data security and accelerating data back up and disaster recovery, these new capabilities support Cisco's Data Center 3.0 strategy to help IT organizations build next generation data centres that take advantage of technologies such as data replication and virtualization.

Technology Enhancements for the Cisco MDS 9000 family of Multilayer Directors:

Faster Data Traffic Over Distance: Cisco XRC Acceleration
Jointly developed with IBM and designed for customers deploying IBM z/OS Global Mirror, this solution accelerates data traffic traveling very long distances over the wide-area network (WAN) reducing bandwidth consumption and shrinking update windows, while eliminating the need for costly, separate channel extension products.

Securing Data Traveling Outside the Data Center: Cisco TrustSec Fibre Channel Link Encryption
Cisco TrustSec Fibre Channel Link Encryption, addresses the need for data integrity and privacy. Cisco TrustSec FC Link Encryption is a hardware-based solution that can be enabled on a per-port basis without any performance degradation. 

This allows customers to encrypt data sent outside the trusted confines of their data center over metropolitan-area networks, such as data traveling between data centres.  Customers with especially demanding security requirements, such as defense or intelligence agencies, may also choose to deploy the technology within the data center so that all traffic between switches is encrypted. Both FICON (IBM Fibre Connectivity) and open systems data can be encrypted.

Speeding Data Backup and Disaster Recovery: Cisco Input/Output (I/O) Accelerator
The Cisco MDS 9000 I/O Accelerator, an industry first, is a SAN-based intelligent fabric application that enables cost-effective data backup and disaster recovery solutions that are faster, more flexible, and deliver mission-critical availability.

The IOA service can be extended to either disk or tape, over any transport protocol (FC or FCIP), regardless of the device location (directly attached, WAN, or MAN).

Managing Large Scale Storage-Area Networks: Cisco SAN Fabric Manager 
Enhancements to Cisco's SAN Fabric Manager increase the number of devices that can be managed by Fabric Manager. Each Fabric Manager node now has a capacity of 15,000 devices, and up to 10 nodes can be federated together for reporting purposes, improving the manageability of large storage environments.