Enable enterprise clouds. Transform large storage networks. Lower operating costs. Deploy Fibre Channel, IBM Fibre Connectivity (FICON), Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) on a single fabric. With the Cisco® MDS 9710 Multilayer Director (Figure 1), you’ll meet the stringent requirements of large virtualized storage environments. As a director-class SAN switch, the MDS 9710 uses the same operating system and management interface as other Cisco data center switches. It brings intelligent capabilities to a high-performance, protocol-independent switch fabric. You’ll gain uncompromising availability, security, and scalability; simplified management; and the capability to flexibly integrate new technologies.
Reduce total cost of ownership with SAN consolidation
With the amount of data growing exponentially, organizations need efficient, cost-effective, large-scale SANs. Scale while managing your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with industry-leading port densities of up to 384 32-Gbps Fibre Channel ports per chassis. Deploy 1.5-Tbps front-panel Fibre Channel performance per slot and up to 24-Tbps front-panel Fibre Channel line-rate nonblocking system-level switching. Deploy intelligent fabric services, VSANs for consolidating physical SAN islands while maintaining logical boundaries, and IVR for sharing resources across VSANs. Consolidate your data into fewer, larger, and more manageable SANs, thus reducing the hardware footprint and associated Capital Expenditures (CapEx) and Operating Expenses (OpEx). On unified fabrics with converged LAN and SAN environments using lossless Ethernet, multihop FCoE protects your investments in existing storage infrastructure with any-to-any connectivity across multiple protocols.
Enterprise-class availability
The MDS 9710 is designed from the beginning for high availability. In addition to meeting the basic requirements of nondisruptive software upgrades and redundancy of all critical hardware components, the MDS 9710 software architecture offers outstanding availability. The Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module automatically restarts failed processes, making the MDS 9710 exceptionally robust. In the rare event that a supervisor module is reset, complete synchronization between the active and standby supervisor modules helps ensure stateful failover with no disruption of traffic.
