IBM, Cisco Ink Deal With AXA for 8,000 Switch Ports

Computerworld - IBM last week penned a multimillion-dollar global server and storage consolidation deal with AXA Technology Services that represents the largest deployment of Cisco Systems Inc.'s multiprotocol switch to date.

As part of the announcement, Cisco said IBM has become the first major vendor to begin reselling IP storage blades for its MultiLayer DataCenter Switches (MDS).

The MDS 9000 switch ports, which can include IP storage modules, allow users to manage remote storage devices over storage-area networks (SAN) via the Internet SCSI (iSCSI) protocol. The switch ports also let users tunnel between SANs for disaster recovery using the Fiber Channel over IP (FCIP) protocol.

IBM Global Services and Cisco said the deal with AXA Technology Services, the in-house IT services arm of Paris-based financial services firm AXA Group, will result in the deployment of at least 8,000 Cisco MDS 9000 switch ports over the next six years.

Part of the Plan

Scott Drummond, program director for storage networking at IBM, said the AXA consolidation is part of a $1 billion on-demand computing deal that IBM and AXA signed in February.

AXA has begun consolidating servers, mainframes and storage devices in the U.S., France, Germany and the U.K., and it plans to deploy almost 2,000 SAN switch ports in the first year of the rollout. After the first year, another 6,000 ports will be installed in data centers in Belgium and Australia.

Ron Roberts, global program manager for server/storage consolidation at AXA, said the company chose Cisco because its "strength in switching is unprecedented."

AXA has already installed a number of MDS 9000 switches and is testing them for performance, feature functions and interoperability, said Roberts. AXA will standardize on the storage switch as it consolidates from 15 SANs in six countries to roughly one SAN per country.

Roberts declined to put a price tag on the AXA consolidation project.

The AXA deal "definitely proves the viability of the Cisco switch," said Nancy Marrone-Hurley, an analyst at Enterprise Storage Group Inc. in Milford, Mass. "No way would IBM risk losing that size deal by going with anything but the best."

Cisco has been offering blades for its MDS 9000 products that support both the iSCSI and FCIP protocols since August 2002.

FCIP is a method for connecting two or more SANs by encapsulating Fibre Channel frames in IP headers for transport over long distances via Ethernet. The iSCSI protocol is used to facilitate data transfers over LANs and manage storage over long distances via Ethernet.

The IP modules are now available on Cisco's MDS 9216 switches and on its 9509 and 9506 directors, which sport 224 ports and 128 ports, respectively.