DS-C9718

Description

Product overview

The Cisco MDS 9718 Multilayer Director is a powerful and versatile storage area network (SAN) director designed for midsize to large enterprises. It boasts the industry’s highest port density with 768 line-rate 64-Gbps Fibre Channel ports, making it an ideal solution for large virtualized data centers with stringent storage requirements.

Key features and benefits of the MDS 9718 include:

• High port density: With 768 64-Gbps Fibre Channel ports, the MDS 9718 offers unparalleled port density for a SAN director, allowing for efficient consolidation and simplified management of large SANs.
• Next-generation hardware: The MDS 9718 incorporates next-generation port ASICs and a fully dedicated Network Processing Unit (NPU), enabling real-time analytics calculations on the 64-Gbps line card.
• Scalability and flexibility: The MDS 9718 supports the Cisco MDS 9000 24/10-Port SAN Extension Module, providing flexibility and room for future growth. It also allows for the transparent deployment of unified fabrics with Fibre Channel and FCoE connectivity, reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
• Intelligent capabilities: The MDS 9718 brings intelligent capabilities to a high-performance, protocol-independent switch fabric, enabling uncompromising availability, security, and scalability.
• Easy management: The MDS 9718 uses the same operating system and management interface as other Cisco data center switches, simplifying management and enabling easy integration with existing Cisco infrastructure.

In summary, the Cisco MDS 9718 Multilayer Director is a high-performance, scalable, and intelligent SAN director designed to meet the needs of large virtualized data centers. Its high port density, next-generation hardware, and intelligent capabilities make it an ideal solution for consolidating and simplifying SANs in midsize to large enterprises.

Product highlights

1. Outstanding SAN performance: The MDS 9718 delivers high-performance SAN connectivity with its 6 Cisco Fabric-3 crossbar switching modules, providing up to 3 Terabits per second (Tbps) of Fibre Channel throughput in each direction. It offers nonblocking, predictable performance across all traffic conditions for every port in the chassis.

2. Investment protection with future readiness: The switch supports both Fabric Switch module-1 and Fabric switch module-3, allowing for online and in-place upgrades. Each Fabric-3 module provides double the bandwidth of Fabric-1, enabling higher line rates and future scalability.

3. High availability: The MDS 9718 ensures high availability with grid redundancy, redundant supervisors, and fabric redundancy. It supports nondisruptive software upgrades, stateful process restart and failover, and full redundancy of all major components.

4. Fully integrated SAN analytics: The switch includes state-of-the-art SAN analytics and telemetry capabilities. It couples next-generation port ASICs with a dedicated Network Processing Unit to perform analytics calculations in real time. Telemetry data can be streamed to any analytics-visualization platform.

5. Industry-leading scalability: The MDS 9718 supports up to 48 Tbps of Fibre Channel bandwidth, providing up to 768 64-Gbps Fibre Channel ports or 384 40-Gbps FCoE ports. It offers scalable connectivity for large storage environments.

6. Intelligent network services: The switch supports Virtual SANs (VSANs) and Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR) for efficient storage network management. It integrates with other Cisco MDS 9000 Family platforms to provide intelligent storage services, such as data replication, backup, and data migration.

7. Virtual machine transparency: The switch enables deterministic hardware performance and comprehensive features for virtual machines, including VSANs, QoS policies, access control, performance monitoring, and data protection. Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) provides end-to-end visibility and resource allocation on a per-virtual machine basis.

8. Comprehensive security: The MDS 9718 offers a comprehensive security framework, including support for VSANs, hardware-enforced zoning, Access Control Lists (ACLs), and Cisco TrustSec Fibre Channel link encryption. It ensures secure storage network operations.

9. Unified SAN management: The MDS 9718 includes built-in storage network management with a CLI or Cisco DCNM. It supports integration with third-party storage management applications and federation of multiple DCNM servers for large-scale management.

10. Sophisticated diagnostics: The switch provides intelligent diagnostics, protocol decoding, network analysis tools, and the Cisco Call Home capability for reliability, faster problem resolution, and reduced service costs. The Generic Online Diagnostics (GOLD) framework enables fault isolation and systems monitoring.

11. Multiprotocol architecture: The switch supports Fibre Channel, FCoE, and Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), allowing for a unified SAN infrastructure. It provides flexible connectivity options for diverse storage environments.

12. SAN Extension FCIP support: The MDS 9718 is compatible with the MDS 9000 24/10-Port SAN Extension Module, enabling large and scalable SAN extension solutions.

Main benefits

1. Reduce TCO with SAN Consolidation: The MDS 9718 allows organizations to consolidate and collapse data center architecture, reducing the hardware footprint and associated CapEx and OpEx. It offers industry-leading port densities, intelligent fabric services, and unified fabrics with converged LANs and SANs using lossless Ethernet, allowing for efficient, cost-effective, large-scale SANs.

2. Enterprise-Class Availability: The switch is designed for high availability, supporting nondisruptive software upgrades, redundancy of critical hardware components, and stateful failover between active and standby supervisor modules. It also provides outstanding high availability at the fabric level using robust and high-performance ISLs, port channels, and Fabric Shortest Path First (FSPF)-based multipathing.

3. Business Transformation with Enterprise Cloud Deployment: With scalability, pay-as-you-grow flexibility, multihop FCoE, robust security, predictable high performance, and resilient connectivity, the MDS 9718 enables organizations to scale enterprise clouds up or down as needed and meet stringent SLAs.

4. Advanced Traffic Management: The switch offers advanced traffic management capabilities, such as Virtual Output Queue (VOQ), extended buffer credits, port channels, FSPF-based multipathing, and QoS, enabling organizations to deploy and optimize large-scale fabrics more easily.

5. Ease of Management: The MDS 9718 provides three modes of management – Cisco NX-API, MDS 9000 Family CLI, and Cisco DCNM, offering comprehensive management of SAN and LAN networks, self-service provisioning, centralized fabric management, proactive monitoring, simplified operational management of virtualized data centers, large-scale fabric visualization, and more.

6. Comprehensive Solution for Robust Security: The MDS 9718 offers an extensive security framework, including intelligent, port-level packet inspection, ACLs for hardware enforcement, VSANs, IVR, FC-SP, switch-to-switch and host-to-switch authentication protocols, and TrustSec Fibre Channel link encryption.

7. Advanced Diagnostics and Troubleshooting Tools: The switch provides a comprehensive tool set for analyzing, troubleshooting, and debugging storage networks, including proactive system health monitoring, Fibre Channel traceroute, network traffic capture and analysis, and performance analysis and SLA accounting.

8. Convergence with Multihop FCoE: The MDS 9718 supports FCoE, allowing for network and I/O convergence while preserving Fibre Channel constructs, latency, security, and traffic management attributes.

Ordering Information for Cisco MDS 9718 Multilayer Director