Bringing Storage Area Networking to the Age of Hyper Scale Data

There is no doubt that we are living in the Hyper Scale Data age when it comes to all things data storage related, which is impacting both consumers and companies. According to Cisco research, by the year 2020, the amount of data stored inside data centers is expected to grow by a factor of five, from 400 exabytes to almost two zettabytes. That’s enough storage capacity to hold more than 60,000 times the entire Netflix video catalog.

What’s also changing for today’s storage administrators is the pace of changing storage networking innovations available to them. Customers require scale and performance to support today’s latest technologies, such as multi-core processors, advanced memory, emerging technologies like NVMe over Fabric, and Flash storage arrays. In order to remain competitive, customers need smarter and faster connectivity to access data faster, 24X7, with zero downtime

Attend this webinar to learn more:  April 19th, 10am PDT.

Designing Storage networks for solid state storage and next-gen virtualized apps

Cisco continues to innovate across both emerging and traditional storage networking realms as illustrated by today’s announcements (Press Release):

New high-performance 32 G Fibre Channel Module on MDS 9700 Directors: This new FC module makes the Cisco MDS the highest-density 32G director in the industry today, achieving line-rate performance across all 768 ports per switch. This new module also offers investment protection, as it is compatible with existing MDS 9700 directors and is field-upgradeable.

New 32G Host Bus Adapter for UCS C-series: Cisco is collaborating with Broadcom/Emulex and Cavium/Qlogic to offer 32G Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter connectivity with seamless support on Cisco UCS C-Series. These HBAs are designed to address the demanding performance, reliability and management requirements of modern networked storage systems that utilize high performance and low latency solid state storage drives for caching and persistent storage, as well as hard disk drive arrays.

Integrated analytics Think deep visibility for your SAN operations: This includes the ability to monitor all flows on all ports at line rate to empower storage admins with the ability to make informed and proactive operational decisions. Cisco achieves this through a built-in analytics engine on the new 32G FC Module that is hardware-based and purpose-built for maximum performance. It is capable of IO-level metrics that are computed in every switch through dedicated Network Processor Units. Customers can now analyze in real time all Fibre Channel exchanges and report on various metrics, thereby providing comprehensive, timely, and continuous monitoring of any potential performance issues or deviation in the network.

NVMe over Fibre Channel: The Cisco MDS 9000 now offers support for NVM Express (NVMe) over Fibre Channel, enabling end-users to scale their flash storage appliances to achieve faster application response times and better scalability. Cisco MDS customers can upgrade their existing SANs through a non-disruptive OS upgrade to support NVMe over FC using a combination of the MDS SAN Directors and UCS C-series servers. The customers will benefit from having multi-protocol flexibility in their MDS installations that can now support NVMe and SCSI simultaneously over both Fibre Channel and FCoE. Customers also benefit from investment protection as NVMe support extends to all current and future generations of MDS switches including MDS 9700, 9396S, 9148S and 9250i.

A special thanks to all our partners for their support and participation to make the launch successful. Cisco’s MDS product line is supported and sold by authorized original storage manufacturers (OSM).  We are very pleased that all of our partners are looking forward for the arrival of the new 32G Module along with the other innovations. Cisco is also working closely with Flash Storage partners, Technology Partners and Channel Partner to bring customers better efficiency and flexibility and built a network that last for the next decade.

Please check out these blogs by our partners !

Ramesh Chitor , Senior Director, Business Development, Tegile, : Optimize Your Datacenter Workloads with All-Flash FC Solutions for Private Clouds

Mike Jochimsen, Director of Alliances, Kaminaro   Kaminario and Cisco work to meet the challenges of today’s on-demand world

Deirdre Wassell, Director of Alliances, DELLEMC, Need 32 Gb/s Fibre Channel? Got Connectrix MDS 9700s? You’re All Set…Almost!

Doug Fierro, Connectrix Product Management, DELLEMC (VIDEO) Cisco Announces 32Gb/s Switch Module for MDS 9700 Directors

Barbara Porter, Broadcom Cisco Readies New All-Flash Data Centers with Broadcom® Emulex® 32G Fibre Channel Networking

Nishant Lodha, Product Marketing, Cavium The Fear of Mediocracy is What Haunts!

Rich Harper, World Wide Technology, Cisco Announces New, High-performance 32G Fibre Channel Switch

Angela Magill, Hitachi, Does network speed really matter?

These MDS advancements fulfill the promise Cisco made to customers with the introduction of the MDS 9700 in 2013, ensuring that customers can upgrade their SANs without incurring the time, costs, and risks of forklift upgrades. This is possible because Cisco built the MDS 9700 from the ground up with next-generation technologies in mind, a critical advantage as customers go further into the hyper scale data age.

Tony Antony
Sr.  Marketing Manager

For more info: http://www.cisco.com/go/mds

PR: https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1837490

Attend this webinar to learn more:  April 19th, 10am PDT.

Designing Storage networks for solid state storage and next-gen virtualized apps