DS-C9396V-48ETK9P

Description

The Cisco MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel switch introduces cutting-edge high-performance, low-latency Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) technology to the market. In addition to increased bandwidth, this switch offers simplified configuration and management, comprehensive performance analysis, and automation features.

Product overview

The Cisco MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel Switch is designed to provide high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity for demanding storage environments. It offers advanced features and benefits that cater to both small-scale and mid- to large-size storage area networks (SANs).

For small-scale SANs, the switch offers automatic zoning, nonblocking forwarding, and small port groups of 24 ports. These features simplify configuration and management while ensuring efficient and reliable data transfers.

For mid- to large-size SANs, the switch provides higher scale for Fibre Channel control-plane functions such as virtual SANs, fabric login (FLOGI), device aliases, and name servers. This enables seamless expansion and management of larger SAN architectures.

The switch boasts 96 ports of 64-Gbps non-oversubscribed line-rate ports, ensuring high-bandwidth connectivity for all-flash arrays and high-performance hosts. It is also NVMe/FC-ready, allowing for a smooth transition to Fibre Channel Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe/FC) workloads.

Additionally, the switch includes advanced analytics and telemetry capabilities embedded in its next-generation ASICs. This allows administrators to gain deep insights into the SAN performance and troubleshoot any issues effectively.

The Cisco MDS 9396V switch supports hardware-assisted Fibre Channel link encryption, enhancing security for sensitive data transfers. It also offers diagnostic features such as ISL and HBA diagnostics, remote port and SFP diagnostics, and port beaconing. These features help administrators identify and resolve connectivity or performance issues quickly.

Main features and benefits

The Cisco MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel Switch offers a wide range of features and capabilities designed to enhance performance, reliability, availability, and security in storage area networks (SANs). Some of the key features include:

1. High Performance: The switch architecture ensures consistent 64-Gbps low-latency performance across all traffic conditions for every Fibre Channel port.

2. Integrated SAN Analytics: The switch includes advanced data traffic analytics and telemetry capabilities built into the hardware platform, providing valuable insights and metrics for performance monitoring and troubleshooting.

3. Telemetry: Fibre Channel and SCSI/NVMe headers can be inspected without the need for external taps or appliances, and the resulting metrics can be analyzed on the switch or exported for further analysis.

4. Dynamic Ingress Rate Limiting (DIRL): This feature detects congestion and dynamically limits the rate of congested or slow-drain devices to prevent adverse effects from spreading across the SAN.

5. CapEx Savings: Users can deploy the 64-Gbps ports with existing 32- or 16-Gbps transceivers, offering investment protection with an option to upgrade to 64-Gbps transceivers and adapters as needed.

6. High Availability: The switch is designed for 99.999 percent availability, with redundancy on major components such as power supplies and cooling subsystems. Dual power supplies enable redundant power grids, and port-channel link members can be striped across four 24-port port groups for additional high availability.

7. Reliability: The switch includes Forward Error Correction (FEC) to ensure bit errors are corrected, and Buffer-to-Buffer Credit Recovery helps detect and correct credit loss without impacting traffic flow.

8. Next-Generation ASIC: The switch is powered by Cisco’s high-performance 64-Gbps ASICs.

9. Scalability: The increased fabric scalability provides flexibility for various SAN architectures.

10. Intelligent Services: Auto-zone, Smart Zoning, congestion detection and isolation, Virtual SAN (VSAN), Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR), and fabric-wide Quality of Service (QoS) enable migration from SAN islands to enterprise-wide storage networks. Traffic encryption is available for security requirements.

11. Sophisticated Diagnostics: The switch offers intelligent diagnostics tools such as ISL diagnostics, HBA diagnostics, remote SFP-error collection, Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN), Cisco Call Home capability, Port Monitoring, and an Online Health Management System for improved reliability and faster problem resolution.

12. Congestion Diagnostics: Advanced congestion diagnostics, such as TxWait and RxWait, help identify devices causing congestion and those affected by it. These diagnostics are logged in persistent, on-switch logs called Onboard Failure Logging (OBFL).

13. Virtual-Machine Awareness: The switch provides visibility into virtual machines accessing storage LUNs or namespaces in the fabric, allowing for performance analysis at the virtual machine level.

14. Programmable Fabric: The switch supports Cisco NX-API, allowing for flexible and rapid programming of utilities for the SAN. Python scripting can be used to augment switch commands and functions.

15. Secure-Boot and Anti-Counterfeiting Technology: The switch employs hardware-based security measures to protect critical components from malicious attacks, ensuring secure access to the system.

SAN architecture benefits

The Cisco MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel Switch addresses the growing need for highly scalable, virtualized, and intelligent SAN infrastructure in modern data center environments. As the industry moves towards 64-Gbps switches and the adoption of 64-Gbps HBAs and storage arrays, this solution offers several important benefits:

1. Server Port Consolidation: With the increasing virtual machine density per rack and the need for higher bandwidth HBA ports, the demand for 64-Gbps fabric switches is on the rise. The MDS 9396V, with 96-ports in a 2RU form factor, provides an excellent solution for consolidating server ports and increasing server capacity in the same rack.

2. Simplification: The switch enables SAN administrators to reduce complexity and simplify management through consolidation. By deploying the MDS 9396V in N-Port Virtualization (NPV) core mode and connecting Fibre Channel switches to it in N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) mode, device ports can scale cost-effectively over time without adding the burden of managing NPV switches. Auto-zoning facilitates zero-touch automatic zoning without configuring zoning on the fixed switches, particularly in SANs with a single switch topology.

3. Multiprotocol Convergence: 64-Gbps links offer lower latency and better network throughput, benefiting storage array workloads. The greater bandwidth also helps reduce ISL congestion for newer storage protocols, such as NVMe over Fibre Channel, coexisting with existing SCSI workloads.

4. Scale and Performance: The fixed form-factor switch provides the necessary performance and scale to deploy a dedicated and standalone Fibre Channel SAN, connecting both initiators and targets without requiring additional switching infrastructure.

5. VSAN: The solution supports Virtual Storage Area Networks (VSANs), enabling efficient, secure SAN consolidation and creating hardware-based isolated environments within a single physical SAN fabric or switch. VSANs allow the sharing of SAN infrastructure costs among more users while maintaining traffic segregation and independent configuration control.

6. IVR: The Cisco MDS 9396V supports Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR), allowing communication between initiators and targets on different VSANs while maintaining isolation of control plane traffic. IVR eliminates the need for external routing appliances, increases routing scalability, simplifies management, and reduces total cost of SAN ownership under the right circumstances.

Comprehensive solution for Robust Network Security

The Cisco MDS 9396V switch incorporates an extensive security framework to ensure the protection of sensitive data in storage networks. The standard security features provided by the switch include:

1. Smart Zoning: This feature efficiently provisions hardware access control entries specified by the zone set, enabling larger zones with multiple initiators and multiple targets without excessive consumption of hardware resources. Smart zones correspond to applications, clusters, or other data center entities, saving administrators time and enabling automation of zoning tasks.

2. Intelligent Packet Inspection: The switch performs intelligent packet inspection at the port level, including the application of Access Control Lists (ACLs) for hardware enforcement of zones, Virtual Storage Area Networks (VSANs), and advanced port security features.

3. Authentication: Switch-to-switch and host-to-switch authentication helps eliminate disruptions caused by unauthorized devices connecting to the fabric, enhancing overall security.

4. FC-SP ESP Payload Encryption: The switch supports encrypted data flow at speeds of up to 1Tbps per switch, ensuring secure transmission of sensitive information.

5. Port Security: Port security locks down the mapping of an entity to a switch port, preventing unauthorized devices from compromising SAN security by connecting to a switch port.

6. VSAN-Based Access Control: Customers can define roles with limited scope to certain VSANs, enhancing access control and segregation of storage resources.

7. Fibre Channel Security Protocol (FC-SP): FC-SP provides switch-to-switch and host-to-switch authentication using the Diffie-Hellman Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (DH-CHAP), supporting RADIUS and TACACS+ for authorized device access to protected storage networks.

8. Digital Certificates: Issued by a trusted third party, digital certificates serve as electronic passports to prove the identity of certificate owners, enhancing authentication and identity verification.

9. Fibre Channel Common Transport Management Security: This feature allows the SAN to be configured so that only authorized Fibre Channel devices can send queries into the fabric and access information, as well as add or delete zones and zone sets, and activate zone sets.

Ease of management

The Cisco MDS 9396V switch offers three principal modes of management to accommodate the diverse needs of users and integrates with third-party storage management tools:

1. Command Line Interface (CLI): The switch provides a consistent and logical Command Line Interface (CLI) that adheres to the syntax of the widely known Cisco NX-OS Software CLI. This CLI is designed to be easy to learn and delivers broad management capabilities, making it extremely efficient and direct. It provides optimal capabilities to administrators in enterprise environments.

2. Graphical User Interface (GUI) via Cisco Nexus® Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC): NDFC offers a simple, modern, and user-friendly GUI for managing the Cisco MDS 9396V switch. The GUI facilitates the visualization of metrics and provides flexible configuration tasks guided by wizards, enhancing the user experience for administrators.

3. Programmable APIs: The switch supports programmable APIs, with native support for Cisco NX-API. This API can be paired with Ansible and Python modules, enabling automation and programmability for customized management and integration with third-party tools.

Cisco MDS Smart Licensing

The Cisco MDS 9396V switch supports the Cisco Smart Licensing Using Policy (SLP) licensing model, which provides a cloud-based approach to licensing Cisco MDS software and port expansion licenses. This model offers several benefits to users:

1. Simplified Management: The SLP licensing model makes it easier for customers to purchase, use, and manage Cisco MDS software and port expansion licenses. The licenses are in digital form and can be instantly credited to the customer’s Cisco Smart Account or partner holding account after ordering on Cisco Commerce Workplace.

2. Flexible License Allocation: The software licenses are not tied to a specific serial number, allowing customers to allocate the licenses across different switches of the same model as needed. This flexibility enables efficient use of licenses across multiple switches in the network.

3. Centralized License Management: Through the Cisco Smart Account on the Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM), customers can conveniently manage all their Cisco licenses from a single location. This centralized management simplifies license tracking, renewal, and compliance.

The Cisco MDS 9396V switch offers two subscription software licenses: Premier and Advantage. These licenses are available for 1-, 3-, 5-, and 7-year subscription options. The Premier subscription license includes Enterprise, NDFC, and SAN Analytics licenses, while the Advantage subscription license includes Enterprise and NDFC licenses. Customers have the flexibility to purchase the subscription licenses they need, allowing them to pay for licenses as they use them.

The Cisco Smart Licensing Using Policy (SLP) model for the Cisco MDS 9396V switch provides a streamlined and flexible approach to license management, making it easier for customers to obtain and manage the necessary software and port expansion licenses for their storage networks.

Software subscription licenses

Ordering information