DS-C9710-V3K9

Description

The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director is a high-performance SAN switch designed to meet the requirements of large virtualized storage environments. It enables enterprise clouds, transforms storage networks, and helps lower operating costs. Here is an overview of its key features and benefits:

1. Protocol flexibility: The MDS 9710 supports Fibre Channel, IBM FICON, FCIP, and FCoE on a single fabric, providing flexibility to integrate different storage protocols into the SAN environment.

2. Director-class switch: As a director-class switch, the MDS 9710 offers high performance and scalability for large storage networks. It uses the same operating system and management interface as other Cisco data center switches, ensuring consistency and ease of management.

3. Intelligent capabilities: The switch brings intelligent capabilities to the fabric, enabling advanced features and functionalities for enhanced performance, availability, security, and scalability.

4. Uncompromising availability: The MDS 9710 is designed for high availability, ensuring continuous access to critical data. It offers redundant components, such as power supplies and fans, and supports features like hot-swappable modules and non-disruptive software upgrades.

5. Simplified management: With a consistent management interface, the switch allows for simplified management of the SAN infrastructure. It integrates with Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) to provide a single-pane-of-glass management solution for Cisco data center switches.

6. Integration of new technologies: The MDS 9710 enables the integration of new technologies, allowing organizations to adapt and evolve their SAN infrastructure as needed. It provides a flexible platform for incorporating emerging storage technologies and protocols.

Overall, the Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director offers protocol flexibility, high performance, scalability, intelligent capabilities, availability, simplified management, and the ability to integrate new technologies. It is designed to meet the demanding requirements of large virtualized storage environments and enable efficient and reliable storage networking.

Some of the product highlights of the Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director include:

1. Outstanding speed: The switch offers up to 3.5 Terabits per second (Tbps) of front-panel Fibre Channel throughput, providing high-speed connectivity for demanding storage environments.

2. High availability: The MDS 9710 is designed for best-in-class availability, with redundant components, grid redundancy with power supplies and supervisors, and the option for N+1 fabric redundancy.

3. Fully integrated SAN analytics: The switch includes state-of-the-art SAN analytics and telemetry capabilities, allowing for real-time monitoring and analysis of SAN performance and health.

4. Industry-leading scalability: With support for up to 24 Tbps of Fibre Channel bandwidth and up to 1152 Fibre Channel ports in a single rack, the switch can power large storage environments.

5. Future readiness: The MDS 9710 is designed for future upgrades, with the capability to support 64-Gbps line-rate ports through in-place, online upgrades to the fabric module.

6. Intelligent network services: The switch offers features like integrated hardware-based VSANs and Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR), intelligent storage services, smart zoning, and fabric-wide Quality of Service (QoS) for efficient and effective SAN management.

7. Virtual machine transparency: The switch provides deterministic hardware performance and comprehensive features for virtual machines, enabling scalability and mobility in virtualized environments.

8. Comprehensive security: The MDS 9710 supports a comprehensive security framework, including features like VSANs, ACLs, encryption, and secure management protocols.

9. Unified SAN management: The switch includes built-in storage network management through the CLI or Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM), allowing for centralized and simplified management of the SAN infrastructure.

10. Sophisticated diagnostics: The switch offers intelligent diagnostics, protocol decoding, network analysis tools, and Cisco Call Home capability for reliable operation, faster problem resolution, and reduced service costs.

11. Multiprotocol architecture: The switch supports a multilayer architecture that seamlessly integrates Fibre Channel, FCoE, FICON, and SAN Extension FCIP, allowing for a consistent feature set across different protocols.

The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director provides high-performance, scalable, and feature-rich storage networking capabilities for large virtualized storage environments.

The main benefits of the Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director are:

1. Reduced total cost of ownership: The switch allows for SAN consolidation, enabling organizations to deploy larger, more efficient SANs while reducing the hardware footprint. This consolidation leads to cost savings in terms of both capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenses (OpEx).

2. Industry-leading port densities: With port densities of up to 384 32-Gbps Fibre Channel ports per chassis, the switch provides scalability and flexibility for growing storage needs. The high port density allows for efficient utilization of resources and streamlines SAN management.

3. High-performance and nonblocking switching: The MDS 9710 delivers high-performance front-panel Fibre Channel throughput, allowing for fast and reliable data transfer. With up to 24-Tbps front-panel Fibre Channel line-rate nonblocking system-level switching, the switch can handle demanding workloads without bottlenecks.

4. Intelligent fabric services: The switch offers intelligent fabric services such as VSANs (Virtual SANs) and IVR (Inter-VSAN Routing), which enable organizations to consolidate physical SAN islands while maintaining logical boundaries. This simplifies SAN management and allows for efficient resource utilization.

5. Enterprise-class availability: The MDS 9710 is designed for high availability, with redundant hardware components and a software architecture that ensures continuous operation. Features like nondisruptive software upgrades and automatic process restarts contribute to the switch’s robustness and reliability.

6. Converged LAN and SAN environments: The switch supports lossless Ethernet and multihop FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), enabling the convergence of LAN and SAN environments. This protects investments in existing storage infrastructure and provides any-to-any connectivity across multiple protocols.

Overall, the Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director offers cost savings, scalability, high performance, intelligent fabric services, enterprise-class availability, and support for converged LAN and SAN environments. It provides organizations with a reliable and efficient solution for managing large-scale storage networks.

 Cisco MDS 9710 redundancy

The high availability of the Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director is implemented at the fabric level through robust and high-performance Inter-Switch Links (ISLs). The switch supports the port-channel capability, which allows you to aggregate up to 16 physical links into one logical bundle. This ensures that the bundle remains active even in the event of a port, ASIC, or module failure.

The use of ISLs in a port channel also allows for significantly different link lengths. This is particularly useful in campus and Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) environments, where logical links can be spread over multiple physical paths. This helps ensure uninterrupted connectivity even if one of the physical paths is disrupted.

The MDS 9710 is designed to provide outstanding high availability, surpassing the uptime requirements of even the most demanding environments. Its robust fabric-level implementation and support for port-channeling help ensure continuous and reliable operation, minimizing downtime and maximizing data availability.

The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director provides numerous benefits for business transformation with enterprise cloud deployment:

1. Scalability and flexibility: The switch enables quick scaling of enterprise clouds up or down, with industry-leading scalability and pay-as-you-grow flexibility. This allows organizations to adjust their cloud infrastructure based on demand and optimize resource allocation.

2. Multihop FCoE: The switch supports multihop Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), which provisions storage in a multiprotocol unified fabric. This convergence of LAN and SAN environments simplifies infrastructure management and reduces costs.

3. Robust security: The MDS 9710 includes a comprehensive security framework to protect multitenancy cloud applications. It offers intelligent, port-level packet inspection, ACLs for hardware enforcement, advanced port security features, and link encryption to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of data.

4. Predictable high performance: The switch is designed to meet stringent Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) with its high-performance capabilities. It provides predictable, low-latency performance to ensure optimal application performance in the cloud environment.

5. Resilient connectivity: The MDS 9710 offers resilient connectivity to help ensure an always-on cloud infrastructure. Features like port channels and multipathing enable optimized bandwidth utilization and dynamic rerouting of traffic in the event of a switch failure.

6. Advanced traffic management: The switch includes advanced traffic management capabilities, such as Quality of Service (QoS), to allocate elastic network capabilities to cloud applications efficiently. This helps prioritize critical traffic and ensure consistent performance for different application workloads.

7. Ease of management: The MDS 9710 provides three modes of management, including the Cisco MDS 9000 Family CLI, Cisco DCNM (Data Center Network Manager), and integration with third-party storage management tools. These management options offer flexibility and simplify day-to-day operations in virtualized data center environments.

8. Integrated mainframe support: The switch fully supports IBM System z FICON and Linux environments, allowing for seamless integration of mainframe systems. This support enables organizations to leverage existing mainframe infrastructure and manage it effectively.

9. Advanced diagnostics and troubleshooting tools: The MDS 9710 includes comprehensive tools for analyzing, troubleshooting, and debugging storage networks. Features like Power-On Self-Test (POST), online diagnostics, Fibre Channel traceroute, traffic capture and analysis, and performance statistics collection help ensure proactive management and efficient issue resolution.

The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director provides a comprehensive solution for enterprise cloud deployment, offering scalability, security, performance, connectivity, management flexibility, and support for mainframe environments. These features enable organizations to transform their business operations and leverage the benefits of cloud computing.

Technical specifications

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