Sneak Preview of Next Week’s EMC World

The Station will be heading to Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas next week for EMC World, always one of the biggest and newsiest storage tech conferences of the year.

You read it here first:

—Cisco Systems is moving into the SAN fabric world big time. The company will be demonstrating some new forthcoming features for its Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors switch modules, including a transparent upgrade to 8-gigabits-per-second Fibre Channel interfaces; high-performance, scalable, intelligent fabric applications; and full support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

The Cisco MDS 9513, 9509, and 9506 chassis support these new capabilities without limitation or need for a major upgrade, thus delivering higher bandwidth per slot, the company said.

The new features are scheduled to be available in Q4 2008. The new 8-Gbps switching modules will be demonstrated at the Cisco booth May 19-22.

—EMC will announce that it will soon start offering Cisco’s Storage Media Encryption (SME) throughout its product line. SME provides encryption and seamless management across multi-vendor tapes and virtual tape libraries and supports regulatory and privacy compliance by ensuring that confidential information is not compromised if a storage tape or disk is lost or stolen.

By encrypting data in the network fabric, users lose the need to manage separate standalone encryption appliances, making key management much simpler.

–Cisco worked with RSA, EMC’s security division, to develop a new software product combining Cisco’s SME with RSA Key Manager as a unified package for encryption key lifecycle management. Cisco SME works smoothly with virtually all standard backup applications, the company said.