Cisco Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS Software Release 4.1 Weißbuch

Fact Sheet

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Rebranding Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS Software as
Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS

Introduction

As part of the evolution of the data center, big changes are coming in the way that servers connect

to each other and to their I/O devices. Over the next several years, the compelling advantages of

server I/O convergence and unification will dramatically simplify data center provisioning and

operations and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO). As part of its Data Center 3.0 vision, Cisco

has already begun offering a unifying suite of products that will bring together the disparate worlds

of IP networks, Fibre Channel SANs, and high-performance computing (HPC) server fabrics—and

more products are on the way.

While many of the changes leading to convergence are product releases and features, others are

more symbolic. One of these symbolic changes is the rebranding, of Cisco

MDS 9000 SAN-OS

Software as Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS

Software effective with Release 4.1.

Why Make This Change?

The industry, with Cisco leading the way, has laid out a roadmap to converge LANs and SANs

over the next several years. The LAN and SAN will first intersect and then unify.

This convergence is already underway. The Cisco Nexus 5020 Switch, which Cisco announced on

April 8, is the first data center product to deliver Ethernet switching, Fibre Channel, and Fibre

Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). To distribute Fibre Channel traffic to Cisco MDS 9000 family–

based SANs, the switch needs to understand storage as well as Ethernet, and the SAN as well as

the LAN. When FCoE comes to the Cisco MDS 9000 family and Cisco Nexus 7000 Series

Switches, these products will need to understand each other’s environments as well.

If Cisco had to merge two different operating systems together to achieve this understanding, the

process would have been challenging, even daunting. But in fact, Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS

Software and Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS Software are the same operating system, and always have

been. The team that developed the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series is part of the same group that has

been delivering the Cisco MDS 9000 Family products since 2002, and Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS

Software has been based from the start on the Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS Software source code.

Both products are built from the same source code tree today, but for different environments and

with feature sets appropriate to those environments. One image is built and installed for the Fibre

Channel SAN environment and storage, and the other is built and installed for LAN switching, but

the two share a common infrastructure, look and feel, engineering team, and code base.

Now, as the SAN and LAN intersect and interoperate, Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS Software has

become not just the OS for Cisco Nexus products, but the next OS across the data center.

How does this change affect you? Cisco will continue to work with storage partners in the same

way as previously. Upcoming releases will be named as before except that they will be called “NX-

OS” instead of “SAN-OS.” The names of the software images you load onto your switches will not