Cisco Cisco MDS 9500 Series Supervisor-2 Module Weißbuch

Solution Overview

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Cisco MDS 9000 Family: Total Investment Protection

Introduction

Evolving business requirements underscore the need for high-density, high-speed, and low-latency networks that

improve data center scalability and manageability while controlling IT costs. As discussed in this document, the

Cisco

MDS 9000 Family provides the leading high-density, high-bandwidth storage networking solution along with

Integrated Fabric Applications to support dynamic data center requirements. With the addition of the third-generation

modules, the Cisco MDS 9000 Family of storage networking products support now 1-, 2-, 4-, 8-, and 10-Gbps Fibre

Channel along with being Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) ready. One major benefit of the Cisco MDS 9000

family architecture is investment protection: the capability of first-, second- and third-generation modules to all

coexist in both existing customer chassis and new switch configurations. A quick look at the storage area network

(SAN) marketplace and the track record of delivery reveals that Cisco is the leader among SAN providers in

delivering compatible architectures and designs that can adapt to future changes in technology, providing true

investment protection.

New Challenges

1- , 2-, or 4-Gbps SAN connectivity is no longer sufficient to meet the needs of growing application server farms.

Requirements to back up increasing amounts of data within a limited time frame, support increasing numbers of

database transactions, and support bandwidth- and storage-intensive applications all underscore the need for high-

density 8-Gbps and 10-Gbps Fibre Channel services. This shift in application requirements is also creating demand

for network-based services to provide security, ease of migration, and disaster-recovery solutions.

In addition, data centers typically run multiple separate networks, including an Ethernet network for client-to-server

and server-to-server communications and a Fibre Channel SAN. To support various types of networks, data centers

use separate redundant interface modules for each network and redundant pairs of switches at each layer in the

network architecture. Use of parallel infrastructures increases capital costs, makes data center management more

difficult, and diminishes business flexibility. A unified fabric can meet these challenges, consolidating I/O in the data

center and allowing Fibre Channel and Ethernet networks to share a single, integrated infrastructure. An important

pillar of this design is FCoE. FCoE allows Fibre Channel frames to be encapsulated in Ethernet packets without

using TCP/IP and is one of the technologies enabling unified I/O.

The Cisco MDS 9000 family offers both investment protection and a nondisruptive upgrade path to higher-port-

density SAN switching, including 8-Gbps switching, network-based services, and support for FCoE all in the same

chassis that shipped in 2002.