New York -- Cisco today announced that IBM has qualified and will resell a number of Fiber Connection (FICON) related features on the Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Intelligent directors and fabric switches.

This will allow IBM mainframe customers to take advantage of the reliability, scalability, and intelligent network services available on the Cisco storage area networking (SAN) switches.

FICON is a high-speed input/output (I/O) interface for mainframe connections to storage devices. Cisco introduced FICON connectivity and FICON Control Unit Port (CUP) management support on the Cisco MDS 9000 with its SAN-OS 1.3 software release. Cisco has also introduced an integrated approach to extending FICON over Internet Protocol (IP) networks using Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP). IBM qualified these features based on rigorous interoperability testing of the Cisco MDS 9000 within IBM S/390 and zSeries environments at its Poughkeepsie Lab.

These FICON qualifications now allow Cisco and IBM customers to address storage networking at an enterprise-wide scale utilizing both mainframe and open-systems computing technologies. For example, the integrated FICON over FCIP support provides new options for customers seeking simplified, cost-effective ways to implement their business continuance strategies. Previously, customers would have needed a separate channel-extension appliance to extend FICON over IP networks using FCIP technology.

Along with the FICON, FICON CUP, and integrated FICON over FCIP support on the Cisco MDS 9000, IBM has also qualified support for IBM Virtual Tape Server and Extended Remote Copy (XRC) technology over FICON and FCIP, which provides customers higher-capacity and faster SAN-based data backup and long-distance data replication capabilities respectively.