Cisco Systems - Cisco MDS 9710 Crossbar Switching Fabric1 Module

Lower TCO with SAN consolidation

With the exponential growth of data in today's business environment, organizations need to deploy large-scale SANs in the most efficient and cost-effective ways. To meet scalability requirements while managing TCO, the Cisco MDS 9710 offers industry-leading port densities of up to 384 16-Gbps Fiber Channel ports per chassis, multihop FCoE, 1.5-Tbps front-panel Fiber Channel performance per slot, up to 24-Tbps front-panel Fiber Channel line rate nonblocking system-level switching, unparalleled functionality with intelligent fabric services, VSANs for consolidating individual physical SAN islands while maintaining logical boundaries, and IVR for sharing resources across VSANs. These capabilities enable the consolidation of an organization's data assets into fewer, larger, and more manageable SANs, thus reducing the hardware footprint and associated capital and operational expenses. For unified fabric deployments that have converged LAN and SAN using lossless Ethernet, the Cisco MDS 9710 provides multihop FCoE capability to protect the organizations investment in existing storage infrastructure with any-to-any connectivity across multiple protocols.

Business transformation with enterprise cloud deployment

Enterprise clouds provide organizations with elastic computing and network capabilities, enabling IT to scale resources up or down as needed in a quick and cost-efficient manner. Cisco MDS 9710 provides the industry-leading scalability and pay-as-you-grow flexibility to meet the scalability needs of enterprise clouds, multihop FCoE required to provision storage in a multiprotocol unified fabric, robust security required for multitenancy cloud applications, predictable high performance required to meet stringent service-level agreements (SLAs), resilient connectivity required for always-on cloud infrastructure, and advanced traffic management capabilities such as QoS to quickly and cost-efficiently allocate elastic network capabilities to cloud applications. Furthermore, Cisco DCNM provides resource monitoring and capacity planning on a per-virtual machine basis, enabling efficient, consolidated enterprise cloud deployments, federation of up to 10 Cisco DCNM servers for ease of management of large-scale clouds, and resource use information through Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S)-based developer APIs to deliver IT as a service.

Ease of management

To meet the needs of all users, the Cisco MDS 9710 provides three principal modes of management: the Cisco MDS 9000 Family CLI, Cisco Prime DCNM, and integration with third-party storage management tools. The Cisco MDS 9710 presents the user with a consistent, logical CLI. The Cisco MDS 9000 Family CLI is easy to learn and delivers broad management capabilities. The Cisco MDS 9000 Family CLI is an extremely efficient and direct interface designed to provide optimal capabilities to administrators in enterprise environments. Using the CLI, customers can enable debugging modes for each switch feature and view a real-time updated activity log of control protocol exchanges. Each log entry is time-stamped and listed in chronological order. Cisco Prime Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) is the network's industry's first converged SAN and LAN management solution. Cisco DCNM can manage all Cisco NX-OS devices, including the Cisco MDS 9000 Family and Cisco Nexus Family products. The intuitive GUI simplifies day-to-day operations of Cisco unified fabrics in today's highly virtualized data center environments.

Comprehensive solution for robust security

Addressing the need for fool-proof security in storage networks, the Cisco MDS 9710 offers an extensive security framework to protect the highly sensitive data crossing today's enterprise networks. The Cisco MDS 9710 employs intelligent packet inspection at the port level, including the application of ACLs for hardware enforcement of zones, VSANs, and advanced port-security features. VSANs are used to achieve greater security and stability by providing complete isolation of devices that are connected to the same physical SAN. IVR enables controlled sharing of resources between VSANs. In addition, FC-SP provides switch-to-switch and host-to-switch Diffie-Hellman Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (DH-CHAP) authentication supporting RADIUS or TACACS+, to help ensure that only authorized devices access protected storage networks. Cisco TrustSec Fiber Channel link encryption, available in the Cisco MDS 9700 series 16-Gbps modules, allows you to transparently encrypt ISLs at up to line-rate speeds, providing an additional layer of protection for traffic within and between data centers.

Advanced diagnostics and troubleshooting tools

Management of large-scale storage networks requires proactive diagnostics, tools to verify connectivity and route latency, and mechanisms for capturing and analyzing traffic. The Cisco MDS 9710 integrates advanced analysis and debuggin tools. The power-on self test (POST) and online diagnostics provide proactive health monitoring. The Cisco MDS 9710 provides the integrated functions required to implement diagnostic capabilities such as Fiber Channel traceroute for identifying the exact path and timing of flows and Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) and Remote SPAN (RSPAN) to intelligently capture network traffic. After traffic has been captured, it can then be analyzed with the Cisco Fabric Analyzer, an embedded Fiber Channel analyzer. Comprehensive port-based and flow-based statistics enable sophisticated performance analysis and SLA accounting. With the Cisco MDS 9710, Cisco delivers a comprehensive tool set for troubleshooting and analysis of storage networks.

Convergence with multihop FCoE

FCoE allows an evolutionary approach to network and I/O convergence by preserving all Fiber Channel constructs, maintaining the latency, security, and traffic management attributes of Fiber Channel and preserving investments in Fiber Channel tools, training, and SANs. Sharing the same operating system and management plane as the Cisco Nexus switches, the Cisco MDS 9710 provides seamless coexistence in a unified fabric with any-to-any connectivity for Fiber Channel and FCoE.

Integrated mainframe support

The Cisco MDS 9710 is mainframe ready, with full support for IBM System z FICON and Linux environments. The Cisco MDS 9710 supports transport of the FICON protocol in both cascaded and noncascaded fabrics, as well as an intermix of FICON and open systems Fiber Channel Protocol traffic on the same switch. Cisco Control Unit Port (CUP) support enables in-band management of Cisco MDS 9000 Family switches from mainframe management applications. The Cisco MDS 9710 supports a fabric-binding feature that helps ensure that ISLs are enabled only between specified switches in the fabric-binding configuration

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