IBM Storage Networking SAN96C-6 Delivers High-Speed FC Connectivity

IBM Storage Networking SAN96C-6 delivers high-speed FC connectivity

IBM Storage Networking SAN96C-6 is a 32Gb/s 96-port two-rack unit FC switch that delivers high-speed FC connectivity in the SAN.

This switch offers analytics and telemetry capabilities built into its next-gen ASIC platform.

It enables a seamless transition to FC-NVMe workloads whenever available without hardware upgrades in the SAN.

This high-density, highly reliable and scalable, enterprise semi-modular switch is for medium to large departmental SANs.

For standalone SANs, this switch can serve dense hyperscale server environments that spawn thousands of virtual HBAs (vHBAs) serving several VM instances. This capability will provide each of the VMs with predictable throughput, consistent latency, and highly available paths by distributing the physical SAN connectivity across six different port groups of 16 ports each.

Autozone enables these standalone deployments to benefit from automatic zoning of host and storage ports without requiring manual zoning configuration. These smaller port groups enable a design with smaller failure domains rather than one large failure domain consisting of all switch ports.

The number of hosts can be expanded further by connecting this switch as an N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) core switch to any existing top-of-rack switch in N-Port Virtualization (NPV) mode.

Large-scale departmental SANs can deploy this switch as end of row, middle of row, or top of rack in either forward or reverse airflow directions, connecting to existing IBM Storage Networking c-type directors in the SAN core.

Key requirements
SAN96C-6 supports FC connectivity. Model 8977-T96 supports all features and functions listed, and requires NX-OS software release 8.4(1), or later.

Planned availability date: July 26, 2019