Next-Gen Cisco SANing

Addressing the increasing demand for storage in IT environments, driven by data growth from video applications, the Internet of Everything (IoE) and big data, Cisco Technology, Inc. announced next-generation SANing (SAN) additions for its data center portfolio.

According to the EMC Digital Universe Study with research and analysis by IDC, April 2014, data produced will grow 10 times by 2020, from 4.4ZB today to 44ZB; 32 billion Internet of Things devices will be connected to the Internet; 40% of data will be touched by cloud; and enterprises will have liability and responsibility for 85% of all data.

To manage the resulting performance, scale, and operational management challenges, Cisco continues to innovate multi-protocol storage networking solutions for its unified data center portfolio that merge data center networking and compute functions into one data center fabric, for efficient business operations and end-to-end management.

MDS 9706 Director

Cisco has made investment in its SAN product portfolio to meet performance, reliability, scalability, and flexibility requirements. With more than 125,000 storage networking switches installed at over 20,000 customer sites, the Cisco MDS portfolio offers investment protection and reliability for customer storage networks.

Cisco introduced the first two members of its 16G FC family, MDS 9710 Multilayer Director and MDS 9250i MultiServices Switch, in 2013. With this new announcement of the MDS 9148S Multilayer Fabric Switch, MDS 9706 Director, and the MDS 9700 FCoE module, Cisco has a complete 16Gb portfolio from top-of-rack small SAN switches to the largest SAN products.

Furthermore, Cisco provides a complete unified data center fabric that is powered by the same NX-OS OS across its product line, Nexus for data center Ethernet networking, MDS for storage networking, and UCS for compute.

New MDS 9148S
The MDS 9148S Multilayer Fabric Switch is an affordable, versatile, easy-to-manage storage networking switch for entry-level and departmental SANs.

Based on the Cisco ‘switch on a chip’ storage networking ASIC, it delivers 16Gb dedicated FC bandwidth per port.
It is available in a base configuration of 12-ports with on-demand pay as you grow 12-port activation license to scale up to 48 ports. A fully configured 48-port configuration is also available for ease of ordering.
A Quick Configuration Wizard is available for out-of-the-box configuration
Eenterprise capabilities such as non-disruptive upgrades, Virtual SANs (VSANs), Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR), QOS, Port Channels, N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) are available
Hot-swappable redundant power supplies and fans provide high availability.

New MDS 9706 Director
Cisco is extending the MDS 9700 Director-class family with the addition of a smaller-footprint MDS 9706 switch for space-constrained deployments, offering high performance, HA with redundant components, and multi-protocol flexibility.

It is housed in a compact 9 rack-unit (RU) form factor to make optimal use of valuable data center floor space.
It offers flexibility with support for protocols, including the port densities of up to 192 16Gb line-rate FC ports, or 10Gb line-rate FCoE ports, or in the future FICON, on the same 9RU form factor modular chassis.
It offers performance with 1.5Tb/s per slot switching capability and up to 12Tb/s front-panel switching capacity, thereby providing investment protection for future deployment of next-generation FC and FCoE protocols.
It offers reliability with N+1 fabric redundancy, hot-swappable redundant supervisors, power supplies, and fans. True front-to-back air flow enables hot-cold aisle deployments

New MDS 9700 FCoE linecard
With the MDS 9700 48-port 10Gb FCoE Module, the MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Director platforms now offer multiprotocol flexibility for SANs.

Through deployment of FCoE, enterprises can converge Ethernet LAN and FC SAN, thereby saving money, simplifying management, reducing power and cooling requirements, and improving flexibility; while maintaining the low-latency, deterministic, and network management attributes of FC.
It extends the benefits of FCoE beyond the access layer by bridging converged multi-hop FCoE SANs to FC SANs.
The high density FCoE is designed to enable interoperability between MDS 9700 and Nexus or UCS Fabric Interconnect switches

Enhancements for Cloud-Scale Deployments
The MDS and Nexus portfolios enable cloud-scale FC and FCoE infrastructures.

The number of ports and physical/virtual devices supported in the network, which were industry-leading values, have been more than doubled on MDS 9700 and Nexus 7700 product portfolios with the increase in number of zones and fabric logins supported
Dynamic FCoE over FabricPath capability enables network convergence of LAN and SAN traffic over the scalable and highly available FabricPath Spine-Leaf Ethernet fabric. Dynamic FCoE establishes the link between leaf FCF switches dynamically, creates a logical SAN A/B separation within the Fabric through VSANs and creates a highly resilient SAN fabric.
Increased performance, scale and SLA compliance for MDS Data Mobility Manager: MDS Data Mobility Manager on MDS 9250i can support heterogeneous array migration with data migration throughput of 3.7TB/hour, in addition to increased scale. Customers can now recover and resume migration operations from recoverable WAN link failure, further strengthening their commitment to meet service level agreement.

Enhancements to Simplify SAN Management and Reduce Operational Cost

Hardware-based congestion detection and avoidance – Dedicated hardware based FC congestion detection and recovery logic on MDS 9700 offloads the software and provides more precise and faster detections. Furthermore it also enables automatic real-time recovery if the customer so configures.
Fabric Automation – Cisco is simplifying SAN management through automated provisioning of MDS 9148S and 9148 configuration on switch power up to enable rapid error-free deployments. Cisco is opening MDS management by supporting automated zoning integration with Cisco UCS Cloud Director, EMC ViPR, Microsoft System Center VMM, and IBM PowerVC to enable pooling of heterogeneous storage assets and centralization of storage management.
Monitoring and visibility – Cisco is introducing three new features to enhance SAN monitoring to help IT administrators avoid outages and reduce risk during change management windows. Switch Health Score combines all of the impactful switch alerts on a switch to come up with a single health score so that storage administrators can track health of switches over time and proactively restore a switch in the event of an issue. End-to-end visibility into compute, network and storage domains allows for resource planning and problem analysis. Automated path redundancy analysis automatically analyzes, every 24 hours and on demand, whether the redundant paths in SAN Fabric A and in Fabric B are maintaining best practices, thereby signaling any issues proactively.

The mission of the Department of Children, Youth & Their Families is to ensure that families with children are a prominent and valued segment of San Francisco’s social fabric by supporting programs and activities in every San Francisco neighborhood.

“The variety of programs, the number of families we serve, and our grant processes require us to have a SAN, in which we house 27 terabytes of data, and manage over 400 contracts daily,” said Shawn Ewing, IT manager. “As a small department within San Francisco City government, our requirements were to start small, have room to grow without replacing equipment, and have a cost-effective solution. With an attractive price and scalability from 12 to 48 ports, Cisco’s MDS 9148S is the ideal fit for our needs, and installation was easy with proven policy-based methodology.”

Crawford & Company is a large independent provider of claims-management solutions.

“The Cisco MDS 9000 Series has been an extremely stable and consistent product line over 10 years,” said John Praet, principal storage architect, Crawford & Company. “We’re confident that the MDS 9700 series switch will deliver similar longevity and ROI, with a lot of flexibility.”

The Banco Nacional de Costa Rica is the largest bank in Costa Rica and Central America. Its network supports 170 offices and more than 400 ATMs across the country.

“We deployed the Cisco MDS Series Multilayer Directors to move from a physical infrastructure to a virtualized environment for greater flexibility and scalability, and the ability to easily segment our SAN environment for higher availability,” said Christian Campos Chinchilla, storage architect, Banco Nacional de Costa Rica. “We look forward to Cisco’s latest MDS offerings, which will offer industry-leading high performance, investment protection and multi-protocol support for cloud deployments.“

Cisco sells its MDS product line through its network of Original Storage Manufacturers (OSMs). Pricing and availability for the new MDS products will be set by the OSMs.