Cisco has unveiled several new next-generation storage networking innovations designed to help customers access, manage, and automate their stored data.
The latest offerings provide storage networking customers 32Gb fibre channel performance across an integrated MDS storage director and Unified Computing System (UCS) fabric, storage networking analytics, and non-volatile memory express (NVMe) over FC support for flash memory appliances.
The new products include the MDS 9700 48-Port 32-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module, which Cisco states, will enable customers to seamlessly scale as demand grows. The module boasts:
- Investment Protection – The Cisco MDS 9700, first introduced in 2013, can now be upgraded to support 32G Fibre Channel with the company’s upgradable chassis architecture.
- Highest Density Director – 768 line-rate 32-Gbps Fibre Channel ports per director for scale.
- High Performance – Full-duplex aggregate performance of 1536 Gbps, for high-speed 32-Gbps storage connectivity for high-performance virtualized servers, all flash arrays and non-volatile memory express (NVMe) arrays.
The company also announced 32Gb Broadcom/Emulex and Cavium/Qlogic fibre channel host bus adapter (HBA) support on Cisco UCS. To meet SAN scalability requirements, Cisco is collaborating with Broadcom/Emulex and Cavium/Qlogic to provide customers with high bandwidth storage connectivity. The 32Gb HBA’s are designed to address 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.
Additionally, a built-in, hardware-based analytics engine on Cisco MDS 32G Modules provides organizations with complete visibility across SAN in real time. Customers will be able to analyze FC exchanges and report on various metrics, providing comprehensive monitoring of any potential performance issues in the network to make informed operational decisions.
Wrapping up the list of new announcements, Cisco MDS storage directors and Cisco UCS C-Series servers now offer support for (NVMe) over Fibre Channel, enabling end-users to scale flash storage appliances to achieve faster application response times and better scalability.
The new Cisco products are scheduled to be available in May 2017.
