Emerging trends such as cloud computing, big data, and the use of a variety of custom-built applications are constantly pushing the needs of the data centers. Data center administrators are considering new ways to best address the varying needs of users while maintaining operational simplicity and providing fast deployment times and automation.
Organizations are exploring various initiatives such as software-defined networking (SDN) and OpenStack solutions, as potential tools for building a more agile infrastructure that is easier to manage. To successfully build a data center network, an organization needs a holistic view of the way that applications, infrastructure, automation, people, and processes interact.
Cheat Sheet
Here are the top five reasons why you should consider the Cisco® MDS 9700 Directors for your storage infrastructure needs.
1 Performance and Scalability
The amount of data is growing at a dramatically increasing rate, and this trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. To support this massive increase in data, data center storage networks need to be highly scalable.
Cisco MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Directors support the highest performance in the industry, with bandwidth of up to 1.5 terabits per second (Tbps) per slot, which is three times the bandwidth supported by our competition. The directors support line-rate 16-Gbps Fibre
Channel and 10-Gbps Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) ports allowing the use of Fiber
Channel or FCOE line cards on any slots without any restrictions. Further, the MDS directors provide consistent and predictable performance irrespective of frame sizes, or throughput. MDS
9700 directors are designed to support line-rate 32-Gbps Fibre Channel and 40-Gbps FCoE on the same platforms in the future, without needing to replace the chassis. The MDS 9700 directors enable scale-out and scale-up architectures by providing the highest scale numbers in the industry.
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Cheat Sheet
2 Exceptional Reliability and Availability
The Cisco MDS 9000 Family provides exceptional reliability and availability. The
MDS 9700 directors offer redundancy for all major components, with 1+1 redundant supervisors, N:N gridredundant power supplies, and N+1 redundant backplane fabric modules.
The N+1 redundancy on fabric modules is an industry first, providing protection against any loss of bandwidth if one of the fabric modules fails, while our competition is vulnerable to a loss of half the bandwidth in a similar situation.
The MDS 9700 family offers industryleading link resiliency with the capability to aggregate up to 16 links across different line cards into a PortChannel, protecting the logical PortChannel link against the failure of member ports, links, and line cards.
The MDS 9700 Family also uses cyclic redundancy check (CRC) to check for frame integrity, dropping the corrupt frames within the linecard at ingress or egress thereby preventing the corrupt frame from flooding the network.
The MDS 9700 directors are also architected to detect slow drain problems in the network. Slow drain problem in the fabric can occur due to several reasons such as server performance issues, Host Bus Adapter
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(HBA) issues, speed mismatches between fast and slow devices in a network. Hardware based slow drain detection in MDS switches happens at a granularity of 1ms which is almost instantaneous. MDS switches can also recover based on features such as stuck port recovery, congestion drop and no-credit drop.
Flexibility
The Cisco MDS 9000 Family provides state-of-the-art multiprotocol convergence and distributed fabric services, along with many advanced capabilities. It also enables SAN consolidation and convergence with integrated multiprotocol support for Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI, and IBM Fiber Connection (FICON), along with intelligent fabric services such as Cisco I/O
Accelerator (IOA) and Data Mobility Manager (DMM). The Cisco MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric
Switch provides remote SAN extension with high-performance Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) for remote-replication and disaster-recovery services.
Operational Simplicity
The Cisco MDS 9000 Family promotes operational simplicity by bringing programmability, analytics, manageability, and visibility to the SAN. The Power On Auto Provisioning (POAP) feature automates switch setup and helps ensure configuration consistency. The representational state transfer (REST) API framework on the MDS 9000 Family platform provides simpler, faster, and more effective programmability on the switches. Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) provides end-to-end visibility into the SAN network through a single-pane view, enabling effective health monitoring, diagnostics, and troubleshooting through GUI-based utilities.
Investment Protection
Cisco MDS 9000 Family products that started shipping in 2002 are still deployed in many data centers throughout the world, having seen three generations of Fibre Channel speed on the same platform: 2, 4, and 8 Gbps. Our MDS 9700 Series directors introduced in 2013 support
16-Gbps Fibre Channel and 10-Gbps FCoE, and they are ready for up to 128-Gbps Fibre
Channel and 40-Gbps FCoE in the future. Cisco has protected customers’ investment in the
MDS 9000 Family for more than a decade, whereas our competition has implemented several major equipment overhauls for its flagship products. In addition, MDS directors provide three times the performance of competing directors. The MDS 9000 Family provides multiprotocol support through its product portfolio. Customers can choose among 2-, 4-, 8-, 10-, and 16-
Gbps Fibre Channel; 10-Gbps FCoE; and FICON; and they can mix Fibre Channel and FCoE on the same platform.
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