10/31/2005 -- At the Storage Networking World Fall 2005 show, Cisco Systems Inc. announced the availability of its Cisco MDS 9020 Fabric Switch, a 20-port 4Gbps Fibre Channel SAN switch. Designed for SMB customers, the MDS 9020 includes simplified deployment and administration features.

To that end, the MDS 9020 isn’t powered by the SAN-OS that Cisco’s high-end Fibre Channel switching products use. Instead, it’s based on Cisco MDS FabricWare, which features an IOS-like interface and Cisco’s Java-based Cisco Fabric Manager. Elsewhere, says Steven Schuchart, a senior analyst for enterprise infrastructure with Current Analysis Inc., the MDS 9020 supports basic Fibre Channel capabilities like zoning, but doesn’t support higher-end features such as Cisco’s VSAN technology.

"[I]t gives Cisco a good Fibre Channel switching product for the SMB market and expands its overall offerings in fixed configuration FC switches," Schuchart writes, noting that Cisco faces entrenched SMB competition from high-end vendors such as Brocade, McDATA and Qlogic.

What’s brought these and other vendors down from the mountain? It’s simple, says Schuchart: There’s a perception that profits are to be had in the SMB space. "The market for SANs in the SMB is something that has been talked a lot about for the last several years, but in the last year many companies are making a push into the space," he writes. "It remains to be seen if the SMB market can be persuaded to take up the FC SAN philosophy with iSCSI, SAS and file-level NAS technology competing for the same market."

At the same time, Schuchart says Cisco’s SMB SAN push might prove to be something of a non-event. "Cisco has been making an overall push into the SMB market, but this announcement will have less effect considering that most storage is sold through storage OEMs such as IBM, HP and EMC." -Stephen Swoyer