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Hewlett-Packard Co. will sell Cisco Systems Inc.s storage switches for up to 30 percent less than other major resellers, officials said today.
HP is now officially shipping Ciscos Multilayer DataCenter Switch family and is focusing on the existing relationships between the two companies sales teams, said Roger Archibald, vice president and general manager of infrastructure and NAS, in an interview today.
“We have not seen a rip and replace, but we have seen new customers deploying new [storage area networks]. We have seen existing customers add,” he said.
In the testing, first announced in January, HP found problems with MDS products failover timing, but Cisco, of San Jose, Calif., fixed that, he said. Cisco could also improve on its management software to better compete against Brocade Communications Systems Inc.s Fabric Manager and McData Corp.s SANavigator software, he said.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP tested MDS switches with both its modular Enterprise Virtual Array and monolithic XP series, which is built by Hitachi Ltd. The storage was connected to servers running HP-UX and Windows; testing with Solaris, Tru64, and VMS will happen in the next three to six months, Archibald said.
In related news, HP will announce security-related products and services with Brocade, also of San Jose, next week, Archibald added.
HPs main storage competitors are partners EMC Corp., of Hopkinton, Mass. and Hitachi, of Tokyo, and IBM, in Armonk, N.Y. All three are Cisco partners as well.
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