At EMC World 2003, EMC and Cisco announced that together we were delivering the next generation of Storage Area Network technology. Since that time, tens of thousands of Cisco’s MDS family of Fibre Channel systems, sold and serviced by EMC under the Connectrix brand, have been deployed in some of the world’s most-business critical SAN environments at some of the world’s biggest companies.
Today EMC is announcing the availability of the EMC Connectrix® MDS-9710. This new 16Gb director demonstrates once again how EMC and Cisco are extending our commitment to storage networking and, more specifically, Fibre Channel. The Connectrix MDS Series enables customers to scale their EMC VMAX®, VNX® and VPLEX® storage networks with excellent performance, rich features and high availability.
The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director delivers 24 Tbps of total switching capacity, with superior reliability, optimal flexibility and investment protection.
Lafarge, headquartered in Paris, is a world leader in building materials. “We have been a long-time proponent of the EMC Connectrix MDS Storage Director, which we use with EMC’s Symmetrix VMAX storage solutions to manage nearly a petabyte of storage,” said Brent Wolfram, Director Technology and Security Architecture for Lafarge Americas. “The Connectrix MDS has offered superior investment protection and reliability, and we look forward to upgrading to the new EMC Connectrix MDS-9710 Storage Director, which promises even greater performance and reliability. With a worldwide business to support 24×7, and tens of thousands of transactions per day in our data centers, we know that we can grow our capacity gradually, and that our SAN investments are protected with EMC and Cisco.”
Target Corporation, a company that has leveraged EMC Connectrix MDS fully, was honored at EMC World with a SAN Innovation award. Target standardized three data centers on Connectrix MDS systems, and has leveraged the built-in reliability and non-stop operations of the MDS series to successfully, and non-disruptively, keep their SAN on the leading edge of new technologies including FCoE.
The Partnership: Past, Present and Future
Our close partnership with Cisco began long before 2003 and has developed significantly over the years. EMC collaborated with Cisco in the mid 1990s to deliver long-distance networking for EMC’s remote replication product, SRDF. Read more about the partnership at Chuck’s Blog.
Recently, EMC partnered with Cisco to offer customers the best choice of industry-leading virtual infrastructure architectures that transform IT and help customers accelerate the journey to cloud computing. Howard Elias, COO EMC Global Services, talks about Three Paths to the Cloud.
Find more Connectrix information here.
