Your data center infrastructure must evolve rapidly to improve resiliency, increase business responsiveness, and keep up with the growing demands of new applications while reducing overall power consumption. Storage costs are growing faster than server costs, increasing the need for efficient and cost-effective storage area networks. In highly competitive environments that comply with government regulations for data recovery, 24-hour access to critical information is imperative.
Cisco Storage Solutions benefits and features:
Multi-protocol storage networking - Reduces business risk by providing flexibility and options - FC, FICON, FCoE, iSCSI, and FCIP
Unified OS and Management tools for reduced opex - operational simplicity, seamless interop, and feature consistency
Enterprise-class storage connectivity to support significantly higher virtualized workloads - availability, scalability, and performance
Services-Oriented SANs - to extend "Any Network Service to any Device" regardless of Protocol, Speed, Vendor, or Location
Cisco solutions for storage area networks provide:
Virtualization
IT managers can provision their storage infrastructure.
Security
Your data is protected when it is at rest and while it is being transported and replicated.
Consolidation
Storage professionals can consolidate resources by taking advantage of highly scalable, intelligent SAN platforms.
Data Mobility
A seamless, nondisruptive migration strategy is imperative for deployment flexibility and to support dynamic growing challenges of enterprise.
Storage area networks are central to the Cisco Data Center 3.0 architecture, providing a networking platform that helps IT departments achieve lower total cost of ownership, enhanced resiliency, and greater agility through Cisco data center storage solutions.
SAN Trends and Requirements
SAN Trends and Requirements
Learn about Virtual Machine-aware SANs in the Data Center. (6:18 min)
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The Cisco MDS 9148 Fabric Switch provides 48 line-rate 8-Gbps ports and offers cost-effective scalability through on-demand activation of ports via software licensing.
The Cisco MDS 9000 16-Port Storage Services Node (SSN-16) hosts four independent service engines. Each of them can be activated individually and incrementally to scale as business requirements change, or they can be configured to run separate applications
The Cisco I/O Accelerator (IOA) provides a fabric-based, highly integrated, topology-independent acceleration service to improve remote I/O performance and bandwidth utilization over metropolitan and wide area networks.
Increase Data Center Efficiency
Data center managers want to increase the efficiency of their data centers by reducing power and cooling requirements, increasing overall use of servers and applications, isolating application traffic, and addressing security issues related to data integrity.
Cisco storage networking solutions addresses these requirements by:
Disaster Recovery/Business Continuance
Cost-effective remote backup and recovery solutions from Cisco allow uninterrupted access to data, help your business meet performance metrics, and provide security for backup applications.
Solutions include:
Synchronized /asynchronized distributed data centers extension over an optical connection (ONS 15400) and IP (FCIP) for continuous service in the event of site disruptions
Virtualization
SAN fabrics themselves can be virtualized, enabling the consolidation of multiple physical fabrics into a more scalable, cost-effective infrastructure, just as virtual machines allow you to do with servers.
Cisco pioneered VSANs seven years ago when the MDS 9000 Family was introduced, and they form the basis of the industry's Virtual Fabric standard. VSANs provide isolation of traffic, fabric faults, and administrative responsibilities.
Security
Cisco MDS-based solutions address these security concerns and government regulations on protecting data inside the storage environment without slowing or disrupting business-critical applications.
Storage Media Encryption (SME):Encrypt data at rest on heterogeneous tape devices and virtual tape libraries
Secure Erase: Erase existing data at a specific logical unit number (LUN) on a storage array
Link Encryption: Encrypt data in flight on Fibre Channel links
Consolidation
The Cisco MDS 9000 Family consolidation solutions can help you reduce business risk, improve agility, and reduce costs. Enterprise-class storage connectivity provides scalability of up to 528 ports in a single MDS 9513 chassis. ANSI T11-based Virtual SANs (VSANs) let you separate a large physical fabric into multiple, smaller virtual fabrics each with their own set of fabric services using hardware-based data and control plane isolation.
Data Mobility
Cisco Data Mobility Manager (DMM) provides an innovative solution for transparent data migration without additional virtualization layers, along with the flexibility to support a wide variety of applications in a timely manner.
The DMM's transparent insertion feature makes it possible to initiate and perform data movement:
Without any configuration changes to the host, the SAN, or the array
With minimal disruption to the application
Without needing support from systems, database, or applications administrators
Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors share a common architecture, the Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS operating system, and switching and services modules that are backward and forward compatible throughout all Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors and 9200 Series Multilayer Fabric Switches.
These cost-effective, scalable, easy-to-install, and highly configurable Fibre Channel switches are ideal for small to medium-sized businesses. The fabric switches are also available as blade switch form-factors for market-leading blade servers, including IBM and HP blade servers.
Applications such as continuous data replication, Cisco Storage Media Encryption (SME), Cisco MDS Data Mobility Manager (DMM), and network-based volume management address customer concerns related to storage provisioning, security, data migration and replication, backup and recovery, storage utilization, and increasing storage costs.
Complete, unified management capabilities are available for the Cisco MDS 9000 Family Cisco device and fabric management software, combined with leading SAN management and storage resource management software, provides all features needed to rapidly install, configure, manage, and troubleshoot the Cisco MDS 9000 Family.
Build Scalable, Secure SAN Solutions
Cisco and its storage partners provide tested and validated solutions that help customers efficiently create high-performance storage environments. With these joint solutions, customers can accelerate deployment, reduce risk, and cut preproduction testing time and costs.
Storage Partners
To test and validate data center and SAN solutions, Cisco works closely with mulitple partners:
Improving Business-Process Flow
(PDF - 650 KB) Cisco MDS 9000 family switches make the Oracle 11i environment easy to deploy, upgrade, manage, and scale.
Mixing Traffic on the Same SAN
The Cisco MDS 9000 product line delivers the benefits of IBM FICON intermix without sacrificing traffic separation and resilience.
A New Way to Deliver IT to the Business
The Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition collaborates to provide business-ready IT to help your organization simplify and accelerate the transition to a private cloud infrastructure.
Investment Protection
Learn how the Cisco MDS 9000 Family provides a leading high-density, high-bandwidth storage networking solution and integrated-fabric applications to support dynamic data center requirements.
Fibre Channel over Ethernet
Fibre Channel over Ethernet facilitates consolidation of I/O in the data center, allowing Fibre Channel and Ethernet networks to share a single, integrated infrastructure.
Statement of Direction
The Cisco MDS statement of direction is a quick summary of the Cisco Storage Networking Solutions portfolio that also describes ongoing research and development efforts.
