SAN Devices

The next-generation Cisco^® MDS 9396T 32-Gbps 96-Port 2-rack unit Fibre Channel Switch (Figure 1) provides high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity in the SAN. This switch offers state-of-art analytics and telemetry capability built into its next-generation Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) platform. The Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe)-ready switch allows seamless transition to Fibre Channel Non-Volatile Memory Express (FC-NVMe) workloads whenever available without any hardware upgrade in the SAN. This high-density, highly reliable and scalable, enterprise class switch is ideal for medium to large departmental SANs..

For standalone SANs, this switch can serve dense hyperscale server environments that spawn thousands of virtual Host Bus Adapters (vHBAs) serving several virtual machine instances, providing each of them with predictable throughput, consistent latency and highly available paths by distributing the physical SAN connectivity across six different port groups of 16 ports each. Autozone allows these standalone deployments to benefit from automatic zoning of host and storage ports without requiring any manual zoning configuration. These smaller port groups enable a design with smaller failure domains rather than one large failure domain consisting of all switch ports.

The number of hosts can be expanded further by connecting this switch as an N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) core switch to any existing top-of-rack switch in N-Port Virtualization (NPV) mode. Large-scale departmental SANs can deploy this switch as end-of-row, middle-of-row, or even top-of-rack in either forward or reverse airflow directions, connecting to existing MDS directors in the SAN core.

The next-generation Cisco^® MDS 9396T 32-Gbps 96-Port 2-rack unit Fibre Channel Switch (Figure 1) provides high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity in the SAN. This switch offers state-of-art analytics and telemetry capability built into its next-generation Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) platform. The Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe)-ready switch allows seamless transition to Fibre Channel Non-Volatile Memory Express (FC-NVMe) workloads whenever available without any hardware upgrade in the SAN. This high-density, highly reliable and scalable, enterprise class switch is ideal for medium to large departmental SANs..

For standalone SANs, this switch can serve dense hyperscale server environments that spawn thousands of virtual Host Bus Adapters (vHBAs) serving several virtual machine instances, providing each of them with predictable throughput, consistent latency and highly available paths by distributing the physical SAN connectivity across six different port groups of 16 ports each. Autozone allows these standalone deployments to benefit from automatic zoning of host and storage ports without requiring any manual zoning configuration. These smaller port groups enable a design with smaller failure domains rather than one large failure domain consisting of all switch ports.

The number of hosts can be expanded further by connecting this switch as an N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) core switch to any existing top-of-rack switch in N-Port Virtualization (NPV) mode. Large-scale departmental SANs can deploy this switch as end-of-row, middle-of-row, or even top-of-rack in either forward or reverse airflow directions, connecting to existing MDS directors in the SAN core.

The Cisco UCS 6400 Series Fabric Interconnects are a core part of the Cisco Unified Computing System, providing both network connectivity and management capabilities for the system. The Cisco UCS 6400 Series offer line-rate, low-latency, lossless 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Fibre Channel functions.

The Cisco UCS 6400 Series provide the management and communication backbone for the Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers, UCS 5108 B-Series Server Chassis, UCS Managed C-Series Rack Servers, and UCS S-Series Storage Servers. All servers attached to a Cisco UCS 6400 Series Fabric Interconnect become part of a single, highly available management domain. In addition, by supporting a unified fabric, Cisco UCS 6400 Series Fabric Interconnect provides both the LAN and SAN connectivity for all servers within its domain.

From a networking perspective, the Cisco UCS 6400 Series use a cut-through architecture, supporting deterministic, low-latency, line-rate 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet ports, switching capacity of 3.82 Tbps for the 6454, 7.42 Tbps for the 64108, and 200 Gbps bandwidth between the Fabric Interconnect 6400 series and the IOM 2408 per 5108 blade chassis, independent of packet size and enabled services. The product family supports Cisco low-latency, lossless 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric capabilities, which increase the reliability, efficiency, and scalability of Ethernet networks. The fabric interconnect supports multiple traffic classes over a lossless Ethernet fabric from the server through the fabric interconnect. Significant TCO savings come from an FCoE-optimized server design in which Network Interface Cards (NICs), Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), cables, and switches can be consolidated.