Since the inception of the Cisco® MDS 9000 family of storage area network (SAN) switching products five years ago, Cisco has been at the forefront of intelligent fabric applications innovation and has successfully transformed its vision of embedded SAN integrated fabric services into a reality. In particular, in the past two years, Cisco has delivered innovative, market-leading SAN embedded intelligent fabric applications such as SANTap-based Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and Continuous Remote Replication (CRR), Fibre Channel Write Acceleration (FC-WA) for synchronous replication, and EMC Invista for the Cisco MDS 9000 family (a virtualization-based storage management solution), which have gained significant traction at various customer locations, signaling the beginning of a new era of the SAN integrated intelligent fabric applications storage marketplace.
Customers are increasingly choosing the Cisco MDS 9000 family of SAN embedded intelligent fabric solutions based on the strong Cisco commitment to an investment-protection design philosophy, enterprise-class scalability and high availability, ease of deployment, and open architecture that supports multivendor host, network, and storage devices. Additionally, customers find these intelligent fabric applications compelling in that they also support the Cisco Business Ready Data Center, an end-to-end network architecture that includes the data network, the storage network, data center connectivity solutions, and integrated intelligent services.
Recent research indicates a growing market for intelligent fabric applications. According to IDC (Figure 1), in 2006 nearly US$300 million worth of SAN embedded storage virtualization solutions were deployed at customer locations and data centers. IDC further forecasts that in 2007, the storage virtualization market will reach US$400 million, and it has the potential to grow to US$1.5 billion by 2011.
Gartner forecasts that the market for remote data replication worldwide will reach US$2 billion by 2009, nearly a billion-dollar increase over 2007.
Figure 1. Rapily Growing Market for Intelligent Storage Virtualization
Source: Actual values updated November 2006; forecast from May 2006.
This document discusses how the main components of integrated fabric applications help address crucial customer concerns related to storage provisioning, data migration and replication, backup and recovery, disk capacity utilization, and storage management costs.
Customers Have Deployed SANTap and EMC RecoverPoint for CDP and CRR
The potential for natural disasters to cause data loss at primary data centers and mandatory government requirements to back up data to protect against such situations are the primary factors propelling CDP and CRR. Lower WAN costs from network-embedded WAN optimization techniques are helping increase market penetration of active secondary data centers.
Existing market solutions to address Data protection and remote replication are point products that do not address heterogeneous storage tiers, and are mainly array-based solutions - but these solutions have the drawback that they are homogeneous which make the TCO high. The host-agent based solutions are the newer solutions from appliance vendors that deliver a heterogeneous capability but the problem with host-agents is that they are painful to administer and often require complex setup, and extensive management co-ordination across hosts. Also, these point solutions do not take a holistic view of the network and lack the ability to replicate data across large distances.
The Cisco MDS 9000 SANTap solution overcomes these drawbacks by offering a storage-area network (SAN)-integrated intelligent service that allows customers to deploy third-party appliance-based storage applications without compromising the integrity, availability, and performance of primary I/O. The Cisco MDS 9000 SANTap solution provides a reliable copy of storage write operations, enabling applications to provide data continuity, data protection, online data migration, storage performance, and service-level agreement (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. Figure 2 shows the benefits of SANTap. The Cisco MDS 9000 SANTap and EMC RecoverPoint solution combines the power of Cisco MDS 9000 SANTap and EMC RecoverPoint and has been gaining significant share in the SAN marketplace, with more than 50 large data center deployments in less than 2 years. The major benefits are summarized here:
• Heterogeneous solution: Existing remote replication solutions mandate tier-1 storage in both primary and secondary data centers and hence require an expensive replication solution and recovery infrastructure. Even with the expensive infrastructure, only 10 percent of primary data typically was replicated. The Cisco MDS 9000 SANTap solution overcomes this constraint by flexibly allowing tier-1 storage in primary sites and low-cost tier-2 storage at secondary sites.
• Focus on bandwidth (WAN) reduction: Distances across data centers have been increasing challenging businesses with high costs for data replication. The Cisco MDS 9000 SANTap and EMC RecoverPoint solution data compression capability (15X factor) helps transport block data over long distances, extending the reach to thousands of miles at reduced cost.
• No host-based agents: The Cisco MDS 9000 SANTap and EMC RecoverPoint solution obviates the need for deployment of host-based agents, simplifying operations, especially in a data center with thousands of servers, which requires extensive coordination and management.
Figure 2. Disaster Recovery: SANTap for Asynchronous Remote Replication
Customers Have Begun Deploying EMC Invista and Incipient Storage Solutions for the Cisco MDS 9000 Family
To better serve customers, IT departments are increasingly seeking continuous data availability during both planned and unplanned system outages. IT departments are also seeking dynamic allocation and reallocation of storage resources based on business policies and the value of data to the business at a given point in time (using information lifecycle management [ILM]).
The EMC Invista and Incipient storage solutions for the Cisco MDS 9000 family are virtualization-based, fabric¬-embedded, intelligent solutions that address both of these challenges, simplifying management of complex infrastructures, enabling nondisruptive operations, and facilitating critical elements of a proactive ILM strategy. After successfully completing the field trial phases, these solutions (Incipient iNSP and EMC Invista) will soon go into production.
The benefits of these solutions are summarized here:
• Pooling of storage: Instead of per-array storage management, these solutions use storage pooling, in which a group of storage arrays are treated as a single unit. The arrays themselves can be heterogeneous vendor makes, and tier-independent, and does not require frequent data movement.
• Centralized management and administration: SANs allow connection of discrete storage components in a single heterogeneous network and help manage the devices attached. Virtualization goes a step further, enabling centralized management and administration of the storage behind these devices and freeing precious IT cycles from having to manage host-based agents and eliminating other noncentralized, inefficient infrastructure.
• ILM: Most existing data migration solutions move data across homogeneous tiers (both target and initiator belonging to the same storage class). The EMC Invista and Incipient iNSP virtualization-based ILM for the Cisco MDS 9000 family handles tiered storage, transparently and nondisruptively moving data resident on tier-1 storage that is dormant to tier-2 storage within the local SAN or across data centers.
Customers Have Deployed Cisco MDS 9000 Family FC-WA for Enhanced Resiliency
Customers have deployed Cisco MDS 9000 family FC-WA to extend the distance between data centers, for enhanced resiliency. The financial services industry in particular has found FC-WA very useful, given its reduced round-trip latency and local acknowledgment-based optimizations. Financial applications require that the disaster recovery site be synchronized with the primary site and use synchronous remote replication for this reason. With synchronous replication, long distances between local and remote sites directly affect the transaction throughput of the main application. Typically, for synchronous data replication, disaster recovery sites are placed not farther than 100 to 200 km. With FC-WA, this distance can be doubled, to a range of 200 to 400 km. Alternately, improved performance can be obtained by reducing distances.
The Cisco MDS FC-WA feature is in production deployment in major financial institutions across the world. Figure 3 shows FC-WA in deployment.
Figure 3. Disaster Recovery: FC-WA for Synchronous Remote Replication
Cisco Offers an Advanced, Scalable, and Flexible Platform for Intelligent Fabric Applications
The Cisco MDS 9000 family uses an investment protection-based architectural approach to embedding intelligent fabric applications, and the Cisco MDS 9000 Storage Services Modules (SSMs) are at the heart of this strategy. The Cisco MDS 9000 SSM modules are designed with virtualization requirements often seen in an enterprise-class data center environment, featuring advanced scalability (the capability to cluster Cisco MDS 9000 SSMs) and high-performance (500,000 I/O operations per second [IOPS] or more), custom-built application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to handle I/O at line rate, and an open architecture that supports multivendor host, network, and storage devices. The Cisco MDS 9000 SSM card fits into the open slots of one or more of the Cisco MDS 9000 family of directors and switches without requiring any SAN rewiring.
Industry-Leading Capabilities Integrated into Directors
Layering a rich set of intelligent features onto a high-performance, protocol-independent switch fabric, the Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors addresses the stringent requirements of large data center storage environments: uncompromising high availability, security, scalability, ease of management, and transparent integration of new technologies for extremely flexible data center SAN solutions.
The Cisco MDS 9500 Series offers high availability (stateful process restart and failover, nondisruptive software upgrades, and full redundancy of major components), multiprotocol and multi-transport architecture (support for Fibre Channel over IP [FCIP0, Fibre Channel, and IBM Fibre Connection [FICON] in one form factor) for SAN extension and mainframe connectivity, intelligent network services (virtual SANs [VSANs], Fibre Channel congestion control, and quality of service [QoS]) for SAN consolidation and advanced traffic management, open platform for hosting intelligent fabric applications (Cisco MDS 9000 SSM module), comprehensive security, unified SAN management, and a design based on investment protection philosophy and the goal of lower TCO.
Market Leadership When Measured in Number of Customers
More than 100 customers in several industries have already deployed Cisco MDS 9000 family intelligent fabric applications, notably in the financial sector, making Cisco the SAN market leader in number of customers. The growing demand and increased customer satisfaction from successful deployments testifies to the Cisco commitment to innovation and leadership in this market.
Multiple Services Supported
Among the major innovations of the Cisco MDS 9000 family are its industry-leading, standards-based VSAN and Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR) features, with potential applications in SAN consolidation. VSANs allow more efficient SAN utilization by creating hardware-based isolated environments within a single SAN fabric or switch. Each VSAN can be zoned as a typical SAN and maintains its own fabric services for added scalability and resilience. VSANs allow the cost of SAN infrastructure to be shared among more users, while helping ensure segregation of traffic and independent control of configuration on a VSAN-by-VSAN basis.
In another step toward deployment of efficient, cost-effective, consolidated storage networks, the Cisco MDS 9500 Series supports IVR, the industry's first routing function for Fibre Channel. IVR allows selective transfer of data traffic between specific initiators and targets on different VSANs while maintaining isolation of control traffic within each VSAN. With IVR, data can transit VSAN boundaries while maintaining control plan isolation, thereby maintaining fabric stability and availability. Integrated IVR eliminates the need for external routing appliances, greatly increasing routing scalability while delivering line-rate routing performance, simplifying management, and eliminating the challenges associated with maintaining separate systems. Integrated IVR means lower total cost of SAN ownership.
External routing appliances, used in competitive products, significantly increase the amount of power and cooling costs, increasing TCO.
Proven and Mature Platform
In less than 2 years, the Cisco MDS 9000 family of intelligent fabric applications has experienced exponential growth in customer segments across industries. The customer acquisition rate is increasing by 50 percent from one quarter to the next, and the pace is accelerating. The financial sector in particular, because of the need to comply with regulations and to perform synchronous data replication and backup, is quickly adopting the intelligent fabric applications infrastructure. Cisco is committed to standards, recognizing the benefits of using proven products, of taking advantage of development economies of scale, of reducing cross-vendor qualification efforts, and of creating products that continue to function in the future.
Open APIs: SANTap and Fabric Application Interface Standard
Cisco has put significant effort into creating an open API to build a SAN with scalable and secure storage intelligence, so that partners can integrate this API interface quickly. More than six partners have implemented applications that use the Cisco SANTap API.
In addition, the storage services interface used in the EMC Invista solution for the Cisco MDS 9000 family has been developed in tandem with T11 Organization's Fabric Application Interface Standard (FAIS) specifications. Cisco chairs the FAIS group, and its own Intelligent storage API conforms to FAIS. At least two partners are supporting the Cisco FAIS API, for virtualization-related function calls.
The Time to Deploy Intelligence in the Fabric Is Now
Enterprises across the industry are recognizing the benefits of a SAN-embedded intelligent fabric services platform. The ease of scalability, nondisruptive SAN insertion, and investment protection benefits of such a platform are compelling and deliver an immediate return on investment (ROI) and lower TCO. With the Cisco MDS 9000 family, Cisco is the only vendor to offer SAN-embedded intelligent fabric applications, with more than 100 enterprise-class customer deployments already in place. Additionally, many customers are performing field trials and are in the process of moving to a production environment.
Competitors are offering single-solution, host-agent-based products and patch solutions to address the intelligent fabric applications market needs. Cisco has offered SAN-integrated intelligent services, for more than 2 years now and has proven that this platform provides a mature and enterprise-class solution. The Cisco MDS 9000 family is in an exciting phase now, with new SAN-embedded services such as Cisco MDS 9000 Storage Media Encryption (SME) and Cisco MDS Data Mobility Manager (DMM) to be available in the near future. The time to deploy intelligent fabric applications is now. With more than 25 years of strong expertise in networking technologies, and with a major focus on becoming an end-to-end data center infrastructure provider, Cisco can help companies consolidate, virtualize, and automate their data centers.