Cisco Cisco MDS 9500 Series Supervisor-2 Module White Paper
Solution Overview
© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Page 1 of 6
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.