… As Well as Cisco Data Center Network Manager

The Cisco MDS 9000 Family of fabric switch and director offerings, resold by IBM Corp., offers expanded capabilities with the introduction of the Cisco Data Center Network Manager Advanced Edition (DCNM) for the Cisco MDS 9124 Express (2417-C24).

Data centers are becoming increasingly massive and complex. Proliferation of new technologies, such as virtualization, adds another level of complexity while enabling higher workloads to be placed on the network. IT departments today are challenged to look beyond traditional silos of networking and storage to manage this converged, virtualized data center. Meeting this challenge calls for unification of the management plan to enable holistic management of the data center infrastructure.

Cisco DCNM is designed to streamline a high level of visibility and control through a single pane for Cisco MDS 9000 Family products, Cisco DCNM is well-suited for mission-critical data centers.

Two types of Cisco DCNM for SAN licenses are available:

• DCNM Essentials Edition for SAN is included with every Cisco MDS 9000 hardware purchase at no charge.
• DCNM for SAN Advanced Edition adds capabilities such as performance monitoring and trending, virtual machine-aware path analysis, event forwarding, and federation across multiple data centers.

Key prerequisites
Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS Software Release 5.2.2, or later.

Planned availability date
March 16, 2012