5/4/2004 -- Long-time partners Cisco Systems Inc. and IBM Corp. last week announced an initiative to ratchet up integration between Ciscos switching products and IBMs portfolio of server, management and services offerings.

Cisco is calling the new initiative the Cisco Business Ready Data Center optimized with IBM for the on demand operating environment. The emphasis, officials say, is on reducing the cost and complexity of deploying Cisco gear in IBM environments (and vice-versa) by building bridges -- in the form of integration or pre-canned awareness -- between the two companies product lines. To that end, Cisco and IBM plan to introduce several new hardware and software products, along with enhancements to existing offerings, such as IBM's BladeCenter system.

Cisco, for example, says that it will introduce a version of its Business Ready Data Center platform optimized for IBMs hardware and software products sometime next month. Elsewhere, Cisco plans to introduce an Intelligent Gigabit Ethernet Switch Module (IGESM) for Big Blues BladeCenter, which should help to reduce infrastructure complexity and simplify management.

Elsewhere, new integration between IBMs Enterprise Workload Manager and Ciscos Content Switching Module (CSM) will enable the two products to exchange application level load and health information via a new Server Application State Protocol (SASP).

Also, IBMs new Tivoli Provisioning Manager will be able to support automated provisioning across Ciscos intelligent data center network, while Big Blue has tweaked Tivoli SAN Manager to support the integrated management of virtualization services on Ciscos MDS SAN switch platform.

Also last week, Cisco announced that IBM has qualified and will resell special Fiber Connector (FICON) features for its Cisco MDS 9000 multilayer switches.

FICON is a high-speed I/O mainframe storage bus. Cisco introduced FICON connectivity on the Cisco MDS 9000 with its SAN-OS 1.3 software release. Cisco says that IBM qualified the new FICON features as a result of interoperability testing of the MDS 9000 with IBM S/390 and zSeries mainframe environments at its Poughkeepsie Lab.

The new FICON features will allow joint Cisco and IBM customers to involve mainframe systems, in tandem with open systems, in their storage area networks. Elsewhere, Cisco can support FICON over Internet Protocol by means of Fibre Channel Over IP (FCIP), which is a boon to customers engaged in business continuity planning and disaster recovery efforts.

This eliminates the need for a separate channel-extension appliance to flow FICON over IP networks using FCIP, says Scott Drummond, a program director of storage networking with IBM.

Cisco did it with a little bit more panache than some others [who market FICON SAN solutions], Drummond avers. We also resell their communications capability [FCIP] & thats a module & that allows you to link two of these directors together and you can flow FICON over them, and you would have an Ethernet over them, this essentially encapsulates the FICON between the two Cisco directors so that it can flow over the public network. -Stephen Swoyer