When Cisco announced it would start selling server systems in March, the company acknowledged that H-P and IBM, which combine to resell about $2 billion worth of Cisco networking gear each year, may be less inclined to push Cisco products. The first such decrease may have just shown up in the one market segment.

The category is the $1 billion a year market for high-end SANs, or storage area networks, the gear that connects servers to storage devices. Its a business that Cisco entered early in the decade, one where the company...