The device will be McData’s equivalent to the Rhapsody and Andiamo-inspired devices that are already shipping from Brocade and Cisco, and which host third-party storage applications.

McData CEO John Kelley told ComputerWire that his company’s first smart switch will run the Invista virtualization software unveiled by EMC last month, and also mention applications from suppliers such as FalconStor and StoreAge. He also said McData has been working with IBM to port its SVC virtualization software to the McData platform, something that has not been revealed publicly before. Kelley would give no further details.

If McData and IBM do port the SVC to a McData smart switch, the move may not be significant either in market terms, or technologically. IBM’s SVC is a virtualization tool that in most implementations runs on a clustered appliance. For some while it has also been able to run on Cisco’s MDS 9000 smart switch, but according to IBM and Cisco most customers have opted for the appliance as a platform.

This is probably because the SVC is not a true smart-switching implementation on the MDS 9000. It is simply running on an Intel-powered blade hosted in the same chassis as the MDS 9000, and so does not take advantage of smart switch port-level processing. Unless IBM is reworking the SVC’s in-band caching architecture, the McData implementation will presumably be the same.

The Q106 shipment date is yet another schedule slippage for McData, but the company is extremely unlikely to suffer by being late to market compared to its rivals, because demand for smart switches is not yet even incipient.

Cisco’s MDS 9000 devices can host a version of Veritas’ Volume Manager virtualization software, but by March this year over twelve months after its launch Veritas had scored exactly zero production deployments. Brocade’s smart switch is called the Fabric Application Platform, but as yet there is no third-party software running on it, or at least none that is yet reaching the market through Brocade’s volume OEM channels.

McData has previously said that its first smart switch will be a 24-port device, to be followed within a quarter or so by an application-hosting blade for the company’s flagship director. The switch and the blade will incorporate technology from chip designing startup Aarohi, in which McData holds a stake.