With a rapidly growing data infrastructure, Cisco® data storage resources has doubled in size every year, reaching more than 2 petabytes in 2004. In the 1990s, 90 percent of the company’s data resided on direct attached storage -- hard drives directly attached to each server. In the early 2000s, Cisco migrated its data to storage area networks (SANs). This allowed storage resources to be pooled into large, shared storage facilities, improving overall storage utilization and reducing costs.

The migration began with the deployment of Cisco MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Switches for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and data warehousing business functions at Cisco’s campus in Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina. The Cisco MDS 9509 Multilayer Director provided up to 224 Fibre Channel ports in a single chassis, resulting in a SAN that was simple to manage. At the same time, the SAN was large enough to support the existing ERP environment, and position the environment for future growth.

The business benefits of the Cisco MDS 9509 deployment include:

• Improved data availability
• Lower capital and management costs
• Simplified storage management
• Better network performance and speed
• Enhanced data security and integrity

For Cisco IT, storage management technologies are as important as SAN hardware. Storage products such as storage resource management and SAN management tools are maturing, and future technologies such as Cisco MDS 9000 Series-based storage virtualization will play a critical role in the large-scale consolidation defined and required to meet Cisco IT’s storage vision. As these technologies mature and become available, the Cisco IT storage group will continue to deploy them in parallel with the hardware consolidation now occurring.

For More Information

Cisco on Cisco
Storage Networking Design Case Study
Storage Networking in EMEA
Storage Networking Products and Services