A. Cisco Systems® recently announced the release of the Cisco® Storage Services Module (SSM) and a new software release, Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS Software Release 2.1, for the Cisco MDS 9000 Family platform, helping enable intelligent fabric applications such as network-hosted, network-assisted, and network-accelerated applications. IBM is announcing support for Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS 2.1 as well as the SSM for network-assisted and network-accelerated applications. IBM is also announcing support for deployment of heterogeneous storage area networks (SANs) using the Cisco MDS 9000.
HETEROGENEOUS SANS
Q. How does the Cisco routing solution differ from the other solutions available today?
A. Cisco offers an integrated routing solution compared to other solutions that require an external router. This means that the routing capability, enabled through a license, is available on all products and does not require additional hardware, software, or additional ports. The integrated nature of this solution makes it easier to deploy and manage.
Q. What are heterogeneous SANs?
A. Heterogeneous SANs is a term used to describe a storage area network consisting of SAN switches from multiple vendors. Most previous deployments have consisted of a single switch type, because of concerns for qualifications and support by storage manufacturers. With this announcement, IBM has agreed to support multiple-vendor SANs that can be created using Cisco MDS 9000-based VSANs and Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR) capability.
Q. What are the key advantages of deploying heterogeneous SAN solutions?
A. Heterogeneous SAN solutions provide greater flexibility for SAN migration and deployment in a customer environment. Using this option, customers can easily interconnect multiple-vendor SAN islands into a Cisco MDS 9000-based core network. Each vendor SAN can be assigned its own VSAN within the core and the IVR feature can be used to route between the various VSANs, making the Cisco MDS 9000 the only platform offering an integrated routing solution. The Cisco MDS 9000 addresses customers' growing needs for broader SAN convergence especially during the SAN migration phase.
Q. Does IBM plan to support deployments of heterogeneous SANs?
Q. What unique advantages are IBM and Cisco offering with these announcements?
A. With this announcement, IBM and Cisco are enabling the following unique advantages in a customer's environment:
• Heterogeneous SANs: IBM and Cisco have collaborated to perform extensive testing to deliver support for multi-vendor SANs in customer environments. With these features, customers can enable heterogeneous solutions non-disruptively without any impact to application traffic. With this, IBM announces support for:
– McData (interop mode) to MDS 9000 Family
– Brocade (interop and legacy interop modes) to MDS 9000 Family
• Business Continuity Solutions: IBM is announcing support for a breadth of business continuity offerings with Cisco MDS 9000 Family Products including:
– Network-assisted replication solutions with SAN-OS 2.1 and 3rd party appliance options
– SVC support for a larger number of VSANs using IVR for much greater scalability
Q. What are the key advantages of this solution for Infrastructure Simplification?
A. Key advantages of this solution for infrastructure simplification include:
• Using virtual SANs to consolidate Using MDS 9000 based integrated IP services to provide support for iSCSI attached hosts accessing virtual disks via SVC.
• Extending the capability of SVC to connect to a large number of VSANs via the IVR functionality of the MDS 9000 Family.
• Heterogeneous SANs enable easier migration of legacy SAN solutions to Cisco MDS 9000 family based offerings via its integrated intelligence such as VSANs, IVR, and Secure SAN Extension.
• Heterogeneous SANs enable easier consolidation in event of a merger or acquisition when two company resources are centralized for integration of operations.
• Integrated support for SAN extension enables simplified management of SANs.
• Utilizing VSANs to integrate a large number of SAN islands into fewer switches for easier management.
Q. How does this announcement reduce total cost of ownership (TCO)?
A. This announcement by IBM and Cisco is focused on reducing total cost of deploying networked storage. More specifically, this solution lowers TCO by:
• Reducing the number of switches deployed by a large number of SAN islands into fewer switches.
• Lowering the number of inter-switch inks (ISLs) to reduce port requirements and hence cost.
• Minimizing management costs by reducing the number of devices to be managed.
• Integrating SAN extension offering into the product instead of deploying an external router.
• Enabling devices in the fabric to take advantage of SAN extension.
INTELLIGENT FABRIC APPLICATIONS
Q. What are the intelligent fabric applications enabled by the Cisco MDS 9000?
A. Intelligent fabric applications are storage features that reduce the total cost of data management by taking into consideration the value of different types of data at different times, as well as the associated requirements for data accessibility, performance, availability, and protection. The Cisco SSM helps enable network-hosted, network-assisted, and network-accelerated applications. Specifically, in this announcement, IBM is announcing support for some network-assisted and some network-accelerated applications.
Q. What problems are solved by intelligent fabric applications?
A. The intelligent features that make up this approach to storage networking specifically address customer challenges related to storage provisioning, data migration and replication, backup and recovery, storage usage, and increasing storage costs. These features will enable Infrastructure Simplification, Business Continuity and Information Lifecycle Management.
Q. What are main Network-accelerated applications?
A. Network-Accelerated Storage Applications, help customers address two important requirements-the need for more efficient backups and the need for cost-effective, high-performance SAN extension solutions for disaster recovery/business continuity-within the Cisco MDS 9000 family based storage network. Cisco is addressing the first requirement with Network-Accelerated Serverless Backup, which uses standards-based Extended Copy technique to offload the data movement from backup servers to the high-performance, highly scalable Storage Services Module, thereby enabling IT administrators to backup large amounts of data in shorter backup windows. Cisco is addressing the second requirement through Fibre Channel Write Acceleration, which uses Cisco-developed intelligence to reduce latency and improve network performance for synchronous data replication between two SANs interconnected by Fibre Channel links over a variety of transport technologies such as dark fiber, dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), and Synchronous Optical Networks (SONET)/Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH). This allows customers to extend native Fibre Channel connectivity over longer distances, which enhances their business continuity/disaster recovery plans. Initial testing at a large financial services organization yielded a 30% performance improvement of synchronous data replication at a distance of 125km. This could be useful for a disk subsystem such as the DS4000, which doesn't have its own Network Acceleration functions.
Q. What is SANTap?
A. The Cisco® MDS 9000 Family SANTap Service allows customers to deploy third-party server or appliance-based storage applications without compromising the integrity, availability, and performance of primary I/O. Cisco SANTap is a protocol that sits between the MDS switch and a storage application appliance. It allows the storage appliance to get a copy of the I/O exchange between the server and storage without compromising the primary I/O. The appliance is no longer in the data path. SANTap provides a reliable copy of storage write operations, enabling applications to provide data continuity, data protection, online data migration, storage performance, and SLA monitoring, without the traditional drawbacks of deploying devices in-band within the data path or out-of-band in conjunction with host-based software agents. Cisco SANTap is enabled through the Cisco Storage Services Module (SSM) line card, which can be inserted into any Cisco MDS 9000 Family multilayer intelligent storage switch or director.
Q. What are the primary characteristics of network-assisted applications?
A. An SSM within the Cisco MDS 9500 multilayer directors and Cisco include MDS 9200 Series multilayer fabric switches enables SANTap-enabled storage applications. The SSE (Storage Services Enabler) package enables the SSM to interface with storage applications by enabling the SANTap interface. SANTap is used to integrate with the following storage applications; they require the SSE package to enable the SSM to interface with the applications. The SSM, enabled by the SSE package, will host multiple vendor applications that are IBM TotalStorage Proven (TSP) such as Kashya and Topio, among others.
Q. What are the main advantages of Network Assisted applications?
A. Network-assisted applications utilize SANTap and SSE package to enable a host of applications that can utilize these intelligent interfaces to deliver a variety of remote replication solutions such as Continuous Data Protection.
Q. What key advantages are offered by Cisco SANTap for deployment of intelligent fabric applications?
A. Some key advantages of a Cisco SANTap solution are:
• Smooth insertion and provisioning of storage applications
– SANTap eliminates the service disruption caused by inserting appliances in-band.
– SANTap reduces or eliminates host-side agents.
• No disruption of the primary I/O from the server to the storage array
– SANTap eliminates the risk of an appliance or host-side agent affecting the availability and performance of deployed storage solutions.
• Deployment flexibility and investment protection
– SANTap-enabled applications can be provided to all of the existing servers in the SAN, regardless of their operating systems. Deploying SANTap allows customers to get more out of their existing storage and server infrastructures.
– Multiple best-of-breed storage applications can be concurrently added to servers and storage.
Q. How does SANTap enable greater scalability for intelligent fabric applications?
A. SANTap eliminates the scalability limitations for intelligent fabric applications by eliminating performance bottlenecks:
• SANTap is enabled through custom intelligent Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) processing application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) from Cisco Systems. A single SSM line card provides 320,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) performance and 20 Gbps throughput. Moreover, SANTap has been implemented in a distributed architecture that enables multiple SSMs on a storage network to provide the SANTap services. Customers are no longer constrained by the performance limitations of host CPU cycles and in-band appliances.
• SANTap can distribute workload to multiple application servers based on type of application and host/target combinations.
Q. How does SANTap impact IBM's SVC application?
A. SANTap helps deliver a robust asynchronous replication solution that complements the synchronous replication offering delivered by IBM's SVC application. IBM's SVC is supported for synchronous applications up to 100km. SANTap along with supported third party solutions offer the capability of performing asynchronous operations at unlimited distances, while offering very high performance and consistency of data.
Q. How does this solution enhance business-continuity implementations?
A. This solution enhances business continuity in the following ways:
• Facilitates continuous backups through ordered I/O and journalling.
• Allows for a device to be rolled back or replayed to a specific period in time. For example, rolling back a file system to the minute before corruption occurred, rather than the previous `night's snapshot.
Q. Are there any customers who have deployed these joint solutions by IBM and Cisco?
A. Yes, there are customers who have already deployed these solutions. For more information please contact your IBM and Cisco sales representatives.
Q. Does IBM plan to work with multiple partners for network-assisted solution offerings?
A. Yes, IBM plans to continue to work with multiple partners to enable this solution to provide maximum choice and flexibility to its customers. All these partners are expected to be TotalStorage Proven partners with Kashya being the first to attain that qualification. IBM also intends to qualify many others including Topio and Alacritus.
Q. Can SVC manage deployments of heterogeneous SANs?
A. Yes, SVC can manage storage dispersed in a heterogeneous SAN fabric. In the first release, SVC must be connected through the Cisco MDS 9000 fabric but this limitation will be removed in the very near future when that testing and qualification has been completed.
Q. How does iSCSI host support enhance infrastructure simplification?
A. Integrating iSCSI host support extends of high availability to those hosts using IP to access FC-fibre channel attached storage. Now these iSCSI connected hosts can take advantage of IBM's SVC and provide customers additional choices for infrastructure simplification. This also allows iSCSI hosts to participate in business continuity by using the integrated features of Cisco MDS 9000. A companywide storage-management policy can be implemented for hosts spanning all types of operating systems. In addition, the same storage and network management tools can be used to manage these hosts, thereby reducing costs significantly.
Q.
Q. What announcements are being made with regard to virtualization?
A. As a part of this announcement, the following components are supported with the IBM SAN Volume software:
• Interoperability mode, allowing SVC to virtualize storage spanning disks connected to SANs in interoperability mode.
• SVC cluster connected to the Cisco fabric to virtualize the heterogeneous fabric consisting of multiple-vendor SAN switches.
• Use of Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR) to scale beyond the four ports available on SVC and extend virtualization to multiple VSANs.
Q. How does this approach to virtualization compare with IBM's SAN Volume Controller?
A. Network-assisted applications running on the Cisco SSM complement IBM's SVC by enabling long-distance replication, which is a function not currently offered by SVC. The Cisco hardware and software offered in this announcement is a platform to add intelligent services in the fabric. Virtualization functions may be deployed in several different locations, such as in the servers, network, or storage subsystems.
Q. Why is this announcement important to Cisco?
A. With this announcement, Cisco and IBM are delivering on a vision to host intelligent applications within the SAN.
Q. Where can I obtain more information on Cisco products?
