Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 10-Gbps Fibre Channel over Ethernet Module Data Sheet

Product Overview

Multiprotocol storage networking is central to Cisco^® Unified Fabric, providing a networking platform for IT departments to achieve lower total cost of ownership (TCO), enhanced resiliency, and greater agility. Cisco Unified Fabric unifies storage and data networking with the data center operating system to deliver convergence, scalability, and network intelligence. With the Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 10-Gbps Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) Module (Figure 1), the Cisco MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Directors platform now offers both 16-Gbps Fibre Channel and 10-Gbps FCoE capabilities, providing multiprotocol flexibility for SANs. Now you can extend the benefits of FCoE beyond the access layer to the data center core with a full line-rate FCoE module for the Cisco MDS 9700 Series.

Save money, simplify management, reduce power and cooling requirements, and improve flexibility by deploying FCoE, while protecting your Fibre Channel SAN investment with the Cisco MDS 9700 10-Gbps 48-Port FCoE Module. FCoE allows an evolutionary approach to I/O consolidation by preserving all Fibre Channel constructs. It maintains the latency, security, and traffic management attributes of Fibre Channel, as well as your investment in Fibre Channel tools, training, and SANs. FCoE also extends Fibre Channel SAN connectivity; now 100 percent of your network servers can be attached to the SAN.

Main Features

The main features of the Cisco MDS 9700 10-Gbps 48-Port FCoE Module include:

●   High performance: Cisco MDS 9700 Series architecture, based on central arbitration and crossbar fabric, provides 10-Gbps line-rate, nonblocking, predictable performance across all traffic conditions for every FCoE port in the chassis.

●   Efficient encoding: FCoE takes advantage of the more efficient encoding mechanisms of 10-Gbps Ethernet to provide 50 percent more bandwidth than 8-Gbps Fibre Channel (the actual throughput of 8-Gbps Fibre Channel is 6.8 Gbps). Therefore, you need fewer 10 Gigabit Ethernet links to achieve the same bandwidth as with multiple 8-Gbps links.

●   High availability: Cisco MDS 9700 Series directors provide outstanding availability and reliability. These are the industry's first director-class switches that offer redundancy on all major components, including the fabric card. They provide grid redundancy on the power supply and 1+1 redundant supervisors. Users can also can add fabric cards to enable N+1 fabric redundancy.

●   Scalability: The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 10-Gbps FCoE Module provides up to 384 10-Gbps, full line-rate, autosensing ports in a single 9710 chassis or up to 192 10-Gbps full line-rate ports in a single Cisco MDS 9706 Multilayer Director chassis.

●   Resilient high-performance Inter-Switch Links (ISLs): FCoE ISLs can be grouped into PortChannels with up to 16 physical links, creating massive 160-Gbps logical links. When you connect to Cisco Nexus^® 7000 Series Switches populated with Cisco Nexus 7000 Series 10 Gigabit Ethernet modules, you can easily scale the number of director-class FCoE ports to meet the needs of the most demanding data center environments.

●   Intelligent network services: VSAN technology, access control lists (ACLs) for hardware-based intelligent frame processing, and fabricwide quality of service (QoS) enable migration from SAN islands to enterprisewide storage networks.

●   Sophisticated diagnostics: The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 10-Gbps FCoE Module provides intelligent diagnostics, protocol decoding, network analysis tools, and integrated Cisco Call Home capability for greater reliability, faster problem resolution, and reduced service costs.

Main Benefits

As server workloads increase, converged networks can reduce complexity and lower data center power consumption, extending the lifecycle of existing assets. Converged networks also improve SAN attachment rates to simplify virtual machine mobility.

Bring the benefits of I/O consolidation at the access layer to the data center core with the Cisco MDS 9700 10-Gbps 48-Port FCoE Module.This approach offers three important benefits:

●   Investment protection: FCoE is an evolutionary technology with the same management model as Fibre Channel. With FCoE, you can preserve your investments in Fibre Channel tools, training, and SANs. The Cisco MDS 9700 FCoE module provides investment protection for existing Fibre Channel storage by transparently bridging the gap between FCoE SANs (traffic originating from server-side networks) and Fibre Channel SANs (traffic heading toward storage arrays), as shown in Figure 2.

●   Agility: Over time, a converged network uses network capacity more efficiently in both LAN and SAN deployments. Higher bandwidth capacity also improves responsiveness for all traffic types. The end-to-end benefits of FCoE include the capability to set up, move, and change both physical and virtual assets with greater speed and fewer points of failure.

●   Simplification: Through consolidation, a converged network can reduce complexity and provide a greater return on investment (ROI).

This module also supports connectivity to FCoE initiators and targets that send only FCoE traffic, thus providing a way to deploy a dedicated FCoE SAN without requiring any convergence.

Product Specifications

Table 1 lists the specifications for the Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 10-Gbps FCoE Module.

Table 1.       Product Specifications

Ordering Information

Table 2 provides ordering information for the Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 10-Gbps FCoE Module.

Table 2.       Ordering Information

Service and Support

Using the Cisco Lifecycle Services approach, Cisco and its partners provide a broad portfolio of end-to-end services and support that can help increase your network’s business value and ROI. This approach defines the minimum set of activities needed, by technology and by network complexity, to help you successfully deploy and operate Cisco technologies and optimize their performance throughout the lifecycle of your network.

For More Information

For more information about the Cisco MDS 9700 Family Fibre Channel switching modules, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/storage or contact your local account representative.

For detailed information about supported optics, see Cisco MDS 9000 Family Pluggable Transceivers.