SAN Devices

The Cisco^®MDS 9706 Multilayer Director is a director-class SAN switch designed for deployment in small to medium-sized storage networks to support enterprise clouds and business transformation. It layers a comprehensive set of intelligent features onto a high-performance, protocol-independent switch fabric.

The MDS 9706 addresses the stringent requirements of large virtualized data center storage environments. Itdelivers uncompromising availability, security, scalability, ease of management, and transparent integration of new technologiesfor extremely flexible data center SAN solutions. It shares the same operating system and management interface with other Cisco data center switches. The MDS 9706 lets you transparently deploy unified fabrics with Fibre Channel, IBM Fibre Connection (FICON), and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connectivity with a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Cisco MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel switch brings the latest high-performance, low-latency Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) technology to market. Along with higher bandwidth, the Cisco MDS 9396V switch supports ease of configuration and management, detailed and in-depth performance insights, and automation capabilities.

Product overview

The Cisco MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel Switch (Figure 1) provides high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity for all-flash arrays and high-performance hosts. This switch offers state-of-the-art analytics and telemetry capabilities built into its next-generation Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC). This switch allows seamless transition to Fibre Channel Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe/FC) workloads. It empowers enterprises that are rapidly deploying cloud-scale applications using extremely dense virtualized servers, providing the benefits of greater bandwidth, scale, and consolidation. Some of the main benefits for a small-scale Storage Area Network (SAN) are automatic zoning, nonblocking forwarding, and small port groups of 24 ports. Benefits for a mid- to large-size SAN include higher scale for Fibre Channel control-plane functions such as virtual SANs, fabric login (FLOGI), device aliases, and name servers. The Cisco MDS 9396V switch has 96 ports of 64-Gbps non-oversubscribed line-rate ports, bidirectional airflow, and a fixed-form NVMe/FC-ready SAN switch with enhanced Buffer-to-Buffer (B2B) credits; it is also capable of hardware-assisted Fibre Channel link encryption. Large-scale SAN architectures built with SAN core directors can expand 64-Gbps connectivity to the server rack using these switches configured in either switch mode or N Port Virtualization (NPV) mode. Additionally, the switch supports enhanced diagnostic features such as Inter-Switch Link (ISL) and Host-Bus-Adapter (HBA) diagnostics, remote port and SFP (Read Diagnostic Parameter) diagnostics, remote port beaconing (Link Cable Beaconing) and advanced reliability features such as Forward Error Correction (FEC).