Cisco MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel Switch Data Sheet

Cisco MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel switch brings the latest high-performance, low-latency Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) technology to market. Along with higher bandwidth, the Cisco MDS 9396V switch supports ease of configuration and management, detailed and in-depth performance insights, and automation capabilities.

Cisco MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel Switch

Product overview

The Cisco MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel Switch (Figure 1) provides high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity for all-flash arrays and high-performance hosts. This switch offers state-of-the-art analytics and telemetry capabilities built into its next-generation Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC). This switch allows seamless transition to Fibre Channel Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe/FC) workloads. It empowers enterprises that are rapidly deploying cloud-scale applications using extremely dense virtualized servers, providing the benefits of greater bandwidth, scale, and consolidation. Some of the main benefits for a small-scale Storage Area Network (SAN) are automatic zoning, nonblocking forwarding, and small port groups of 24 ports. Benefits for a mid- to large-size SAN include higher scale for Fibre Channel control-plane functions such as virtual SANs, fabric login (FLOGI), device aliases, and name servers. The Cisco MDS 9396V switch has 96 ports of 64-Gbps non-oversubscribed line-rate ports, bidirectional airflow, and a fixed-form NVMe/FC-ready SAN switch with enhanced Buffer-to-Buffer (B2B) credits; it is also capable of hardware-assisted Fibre Channel link encryption. Large-scale SAN architectures built with SAN core directors can expand 64-Gbps connectivity to the server rack using these switches configured in either switch mode or N Port Virtualization (NPV) mode. Additionally, the switch supports enhanced diagnostic features such as Inter-Switch Link (ISL) and Host-Bus-Adapter (HBA) diagnostics, remote port and SFP (Read Diagnostic Parameter) diagnostics, remote port beaconing (Link Cable Beaconing) and advanced reliability features such as Forward Error Correction (FEC).

Main features and benefits

The main features of the Cisco MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel Switch include:

●      High performance: MDS 9396V architecture, with centralized nonblocking arbitration, provides consistent 64-Gbps low-latency performance across all traffic conditions for every Fibre Channel port on the switch.

●      Fully integrated SAN Analytics[1]: This feature-rich switch also offers state-of-the-art data traffic analytics and telemetry capabilities that have been built into this next-generation hardware platform. This switch has a hardware Analytics Engine that can compute I/O metrics at line rate on all port.

●      Telemetry[^[1]]: Fibre Channel and Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) or NVMe headers can be inspected without the need for any external taps or appliances. The resulting metrics can be analyzed on the switch and can additionally be exported in an industry-leading open telemetry format using the mgmt port for telemetry and analytics purposes.

●      Cisco Dynamic Ingress Rate Limiting (DIRL): MDS 9396V supports the Dynamic Ingress Rate Limiting feature. Using DIRL, the MDS SAN can automatically detect any symptoms of congestion and then dynamically rate limit the congested and slow-drain devices so that adverse effects are not spread to other devices across the SAN. DIRL dynamically adapts the rate-limiting to suit the traffic pattern of the congestion or slow-drain device.

●      Capital Expenditures (CapEx) savings: The 64-Gbps ports allow users to deploy them with existing 32- or 16-Gbps transceivers, thus providing investment protection, with an option to upgrade to 64-Gbps transceivers and adapters whenever needed.

●      High availability: the MDS 9396V switch is designed to provide 99.999 percent availability. It provides such outstanding availability and reliability by having redundancy on all major components, such as the power supply and cooling subsystems. Dual power supplies also facilitate redundant power grids. In addition, port-channel link members can be striped across four 24-port port groups, thus providing additional high availability.

●      Reliability: As part of the standard 64-Gbps Fibre Channel specification, Cisco provides FEC on all 64-Gbps Fibre Channel fixed switches. This feature helps ensure bit errors up to a certain threshold introduced in flight get corrected at the receive side of the link. In addition, Cisco extends Buffer-to-Buffer Credit Recovery through Buffer-to-Buffer State Change Notification (BBSCN) to all port types that are attached to any end device. Over time, the corruption of receiver-ready, known as R_RDY primitives, can lead to a loss of credits, which can eventually cause a link to stop transmitting in one direction. Buffer-to-Buffer credit recovery provides for two attached ports to detect and correct this situation without impact to traffic flow.

●      Next-generation ASIC: The MDS 9396V Fibre Channel switch is powered by Cisco developed next- generation high-performance 64-Gbps ASICs.

●      Higher scalability: Increased fabric scalability provides more flexibility for a variety of SAN architectures.

●      Intelligent services: Auto-zone, Smart Zoning, congestion detection and isolation, Virtual SAN (VSAN) and Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR), and fabric-wide Quality of Service (QoS) enable migration from SAN islands to enterprise-wide storage networks. Traffic encryption is available to meet stringent security requirements.

●      Sophisticated diagnostics: The MDS 9396V provides intelligent diagnostics tools such as ISL diagnostics, HBA diagnostics, remote SFP-error collection, Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN), integrated Cisco Call Home capability, Port Monitoring and an Online Health Management System for greater reliability, faster problem resolution, and reduced service costs.

●      Congestion Diagnostics: The MDS 9396V has advanced congestion diagnostics such as TxWait to identify culprit devices that are not returning credits and the new RxWait to identify victim devices that are being affected by congestion. These important congestion diagnostics, as well as several others are logged in persistent, on-switch, time and date stamped logs called Onboard Failure Logging (OBFL).

●      Virtual-machine awareness: The MDS 9396V provides visibility into all virtual machines that are accessing storage LUNs or namespaces in the fabric. This feature is available through HBAs capable of priority tagging the Virtual Machine Identifier (VMID) on every Fibre Channel frame. Virtual-machine awareness can be extended to intelligent fabric services such as analytics to visualize performance of every flow originating from each virtual machine in the fabric.

●      Programmable fabric: The MDS 9396V provides Cisco NX-API, a powerful RPC-style HTTP/HTTPS API to enable flexible and rapid programming of utilities for the SAN. This can be coupled with specific modules for Ansible and Python. The switch also provides an on-switch Python 3 interpreter so Python scripts can be used to augment existing switch commands and functions.

●      Secure-boot and anti-counterfeiting technology: The MDS 9396V uses onboard hardware that protects the entire system from malicious attacks by securing access to critical components such as the bootloader, system image loader, and Joint Test Action Group (JTAG) interface.

SAN architecture benefits

The new 64-Gbps fabric switches address the requirement for highly scalable, virtualized, intelligent SAN infrastructure in current-generation data center environments. The industry is already poised to transition to 64-Gbps switches with the availability of 64-Gbps HBAs and storage arrays from vendors. Additionally, as low-latency flash arrays and extremely dense virtualization deployments become more pervasive, fixed switches will be expected to provide 64-Gbps connectivity to the SAN core.

This solution offers several important benefits:

●      Server port consolidation: The demand for 64-Gbps fabric switches will increase as hyperscale virtualization doubles the virtual machine density per rack, increasing the need for higher bandwidth HBA ports per rack of blade or standalone servers. Soon 64-Gbps HBA ports will consolidate the current 16-Gbps HBA installed base, with the need to increase the server capacity in the same rack. Hence, the MDS 9396V, with 96-ports in a 2RU form factor, provides an excellent solution.

●      Simplification: Through consolidation, the SAN administrator can reduce complexity and simplify management. With an MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port switch in N-Port Virtualization (NPV) core mode and Fibre Channel switches connecting to it in N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) mode, device ports can scale very cost-effectively over time without adding the burden of managing the NPV switches. Auto-zoning facilitates zero-touch automatic zoning without any need for configuring zoning on the 64-Gbps fixed switches that are deployed in SANs with a single switch topology.

●      Multiprotocol convergence: 64-Gbps links benefit from lower latency when compared to lower bandwidth links, bringing better network throughput to your storage array workloads. Greater bandwidth also helps ensure less ISL congestion for the newer storage protocols that are expected to be available on externally attached storage arrays: for instance, NVMe over Fibre Channel can coexist on the same link as existing SCSI workloads.

●      Scale and performance: This fixed form-factor switch supports the performance and scale required to deploy a dedicated and standalone Fibre Channel SAN connecting both initiators and targets without requiring any other switching infrastructure.

●      VSAN: VSANs are ideal for efficient, secure SAN consolidation, enabling more efficient storage network utilization by creating hardware-based isolated environments with a single physical 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 complete segregation of traffic and retaining independent control of configuration on a VSAN-by-VSAN basis.

●      IVR: In another step toward deploying efficient, cost effective, consolidated storage networks, the Cisco MDS 9396V supports Inter-VSAN-Routing (IVR), the industry’s first inter-VSAN routing function for Fibre Channel. IVR allows communication between initiators and targets on different VSANs while maintaining isolation of control plane traffic, thereby maintaining fabric stability and availability. IVR is one of the feature enhancements requiring a license and 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. Under the right circumstances, deploying IVR means lower total cost of SAN ownership.

Comprehensive solution for Robust Network Security

To address the need for enhanced security in storage networks, the Cisco MDS 9396V switch includes as standard an extensive security framework to protect highly sensitive data crossing today’s enterprise networks:

●      Smart Zoning: When the Smart Zoning feature is enabled, Cisco MDS 9000 Family fabrics provision the hardware access control entries specified by the zone set more efficiently, avoiding the superfluous entries that would allow servers (initiators) to communicate to other servers, or allow storage devices (targets) to communicate to other storage devices. This feature makes larger zones with multiple initiators and multiple targets feasible without excessive consumption of hardware resources. Thus, smart zones can correspond to applications, application clusters, hypervisor clusters, or other data center entities, saving the time that administrators previously spent creating many small zones, and enabling the automation of zoning tasks.

●      Intelligent packet inspection is provided at the port level, including the application of ACLs for hardware enforcement of zones, VSANs, and advanced port security features.

●      Switch-to-switch and host-to-switch authentication helps eliminate disruptions that may occur because of unauthorized devices connecting to a large enterprise fabric.

●      FC-SP ESP payload encryption, which supports encrypted data to flow through the switch, is supported up to 1Tbps per switch.

●      Port security locks down the mapping of an entity to a switch port to help ensure that SAN security is not compromised by the connection of unauthorized devices to a switch port.

●      VSAN-based access control allows customers to define roles in which the scope of the roles is limited to certain VSANs.

●      Fibre Channel Security Protocol (FC-SP) provides switch-to-switch and host-to-switch Diffie-Hellman Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (DH-CHAP) authentication, supporting RADIUS and TACACS+, to help ensure that only authorized devices access protected storage networks.

●      Digital certificates are issued by a trusted third party and are used as electronic passports to prove the identity of certificate owners.

●      The Fibre Channel Common Transport Management Security feature allows the SAN to be configured so that only authorized Fibre Channel devices can send queries into the fabric and access information such as logged in devices, switches in the fabric, connection information, etc. Additionally, the SAN can be configured so that only authorized Fibre Channel devices can add or delete zones and zone sets, as well as activate zone sets.

Ease of management

To meet the needs of all users, the Cisco MDS 9396V switch provides three principal modes of management as well as integration with third-party storage management tools.

The Cisco MDS 9396V presents a consistent, logical Command Line Interface (CLI). Adhering to the syntax of the widely known Cisco NX-OS Software CLI, the Cisco MDS 9000 Family CLI is easy to learn and delivers broad management capabilities. The Cisco MDS 9000 Family CLI is an extremely efficient and direct interface designed to provide optimal capabilities to administrators in enterprise environments.

The second mode of management is through a simple and efficient GUI provided by Cisco Nexus^® Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC). NDFC provides a simple, modern, and friendly UI, where visualization of metrics is flexible and configuration tasks are guided by wizards.

The third mode of management is through programmable APIs. Cisco NX-API is supported natively on MDS switches and can be paired with Ansible and Python modules.

Cisco MDS Smart Licensing

The Cisco MDS 9396V switch supports the Cisco Smart Licensing Using Policy (SLP) licensing model. With this cloud-based licensing model, it is easier to buy, use, and manage Cisco MDS software and port expansion licenses for the MDS 9396V. The licenses are in digital form and, once ordered on Cisco Commerce Workplace, are credited instantly to the customer’s Cisco Smart Account or partner holding account. The software licenses are not tied to a serial number, so a customer can allocate the software licenses on different switches of the same model as required. Through the Cisco Smart Account on Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM), a customer can easily manage all its Cisco licenses from one single place.

The Cisco MDS 996V implements a simplified licensing model with two subscription software licenses – Premier and Advantage – available with 1-, 3-, 5-, and 7-year options for direct sale and for sale to OSM partners. The Premier subscription license includes Enterprise, NDFC, and SAN Analytics licenses, and the Advantage subscription license includes Enterprise and NDFC licenses. Customers can buy the subscription licenses as required, so they pay as they use.

Table 1.        Software subscription licenses

Product specifications

Table 2.        Product specifications

Ordering information

Table 3.        Ordering information

Product sustainability

Information about Cisco’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives and performance is provided in Cisco’s CSR and sustainability reporting.

Table 4.        Product sustainability

Cisco makes the packaging data available for informational purposes only. It may not reflect the most current legal developments, and Cisco does not represent, warrant, or guarantee that it is complete, accurate, or up to date. This information is subject to change without notice.

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