Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module Data Sheet

Product Overview

Enable convergence, scalability, and intelligence in large, virtualized data centers with the Cisco^® MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module. With industry-leading port densities of line‑rate 16-Gbps Fibre Channel ports per director chassis, intelligent fabric services such as integrated VSANs, Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR), and PortChannels, the Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module (Figure 1) enables deployment of large, scalable, and virtualized data centers.

The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module is designed for the most demanding storage networking environments. It delivers full-duplex aggregate performance of 768 Gbps, making it well suited for high-speed 16-Gbps storage subsystems, 16-Gbps Inter-Switch Links (ISLs), and high-performance virtualized servers.

The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module enables you to consolidate SAN deployments with fewer hardware components. You can consolidate workloads from hundreds of virtual machines with high performance, and scale with incremental updates as your SAN grows - all while protecting your existing investment. The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module also provides Cisco VMpath technology that enables advanced virtual machine-aware SAN provisioning and monitoring for virtualized data centers. With Cisco VMpath, you can monitor, manage, and control SAN resource allocation and performance on a per-virtual machine basis, and map paths all the way from the server to storage enabling end-to-end tracking of mission-critical workloads.

The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module is hot swappable and compatible with 2/4/8-Gbps, 4/8/16-Gbps, and 10-Gbps Fibre Channel interfaces and supports hot-swappable Enhanced Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP+) transceivers. It also supports 10 Gigabit Ethernet clocked optics carrying 10-Gbps Fibre Channel traffic. Individual ports can be configured with Cisco 16-Gbps, 8-Gbps, or 10-Gbps SFP+ transceivers. Each port supports 500 buffer credits for exceptional extensibility without requiring additional licensing. With the Cisco Enterprise Package license, up to 4095 buffer credits can be allocated to an individual port, enabling full link bandwidth over long distances with no degradation in link utilization.

The 16-Gbps Fibre Channel switching module also provides previously available features such as predictable performance and high availability, advanced traffic management capabilities, integrated VSANs and IVR, resilient high-performance ISLs, comprehensive security frameworks, fault detection and isolation of errored packets, and sophisticated diagnostics.

Main Features

●   Outstanding SAN performance: The combination of the 16-Gbps Fibre Channel switching module and the Fabric-1 crossbar switching modules enables up to 1.5 Tbps of Fibre Channel throughput between modules in each direction for each payload slot in the Cisco MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Directors. This per-slot bandwidth is twice the bandwidth needed to support a 48-port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel module at full line rate. Cisco MDS 9700 Series architecture, based on central arbitration and crossbar fabric, provides 16-Gbps line-rate, nonblocking, predictable performance across all traffic conditions for every port in the chassis.

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

●   Industry-leading scalability: Cisco MDS 9700 Series director switches combine industry-leading scalability with performance to meet the needs of even the largest data center storage environments. The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director supports up to 24 terabits per second (Tbps) of Fibre Channel system bandwidth and 384 2/4/8/16-Gbps full line-rate autosensing Fibre Channel ports in a single chassis. The smaller Cisco MDS 9706 Multilayer Director supports up to 12 Tbps of Fibre Channel system bandwidth and 192 2/4/8/16-Gbps full line-rate autosensing Fibre Channel ports in a single chassis.

●   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.

◦     Integrated hardware-based VSANs and IVR: VSANs are integrated into port-level hardware so any port in a system or fabric can be partitioned to any VSAN. IVR provides line-rate routing between any ports in a system or fabric without external routing appliances.

◦     Intelligent storage services: The Cisco MDS 9700 Series operates with intelligent service capabilities on other Cisco MDS 9000 Family platforms to provide services such as acceleration of storage applications for data replication and backup and data migration to hosts and targets attached to the Cisco MDS 9700 Series director.

◦     Smart zoning: When the Smart Zoning feature is enabled, Cisco MDS 9700 Series fabrics provision the hardware access control entries specified by the zone set more efficiently, avoiding the superfluous entries that would allow servers (initiators) to talk to other servers, or allow storage devices (targets) to talk 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.

●   Virtual machine transparency: The Cisco MDS 9700 Series provides deterministic hardware performance and a comprehensive feature set that allows virtual machines to have the same SAN attributes as a physical server. On a per-virtual machine basis, Cisco NX-OS Software offers VSANs, QoS policies, access control, performance monitoring, and data protection to promote the scalability and mobility of virtual machines. Cisco Prime^™ Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) enables rapid troubleshooting in mission-critical virtualized environments by providing end-to-end visibility from the virtual machine to storage with resource allocation, performance measurements, and predictions available on a per-virtual machine basis.

●   Comprehensive security: The Cisco MDS 9700 Series supports services including VSANs, hardware-enforced zoning, ACLs, per-VSAN role-based access control (RBAC), and Cisco TrustSec^® Fibre Channel link encryption. Its comprehensive security framework consists of RADIUS and TACACS+, Fibre Channel Security Protocol (FC-SP), Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol, and Simple Network Management Protocol Version 3 (SNMPv3). Cisco TrustSec Fibre Channel link encryption delivers transparent, hardware-based 16-Gbps line-rate encryption of Fibre Channel data on 16-Gbps Fibre Channel switching modules, in addition to 10-Gbps line-rate encryption.

●   Resilient high-performance ISLs: Cisco MDS 9700 Series 16-Gbps Fibre Channel switching modules support high-performance ISLs consisting of 16- or 10-Gbps secure Fibre Channel. Fibre Channel switching modules also offer PortChannel technology for added scalability and resilience. Group up to 16 links spanning any port on any module in a chassis into a logical link. Up to 4095 buffer-to-buffer credits can be assigned to a single Fibre Channel port, providing industry-leading extension of storage networks to up to 4000 km at 2 Gbps, 2000 km at 4 Gbps, 1000 km at 8 Gbps, 500 km at 16 Gbps, or 680 km at 10 Gbps while maintaining full link bandwidth. The Cisco MDS 9700 Series switch architecture helps ensure that frames can never be reordered within a switch.

●   Sophisticated diagnostics: The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module provides intelligent diagnostics, protocol decoding, and network analysis tools as well as integrated Cisco Call Home capability for added reliability, faster problem resolution, and reduced service costs.

●   Advanced IBM FICON services: The Cisco MDS 9710 and Cisco MDS 9706 director switches are mainframe ready, with full support for FICON and Linux environments.

Main Benefits

Lower Total Cost of Ownership with SAN Consolidation

With the exponential growth of data in today’s business environment, organizations need to deploy large-scale SANs in the most efficient and cost-effective ways. To meet scalability requirements while managing total cost of ownership (TCO), the Cisco MDS 9700 Series directors offer industry-leading port densities of line-rate16-Gbps Fibre Channel ports per chassis, 1.5-Tbps Fibre Channel performance per slot, up to 24-Tbps front-panel Fibre Channel line-rate nonblocking system-level switching, exceptional capabilities with intelligent fabric services, VSANs for consolidating individual physical SAN islands while maintaining logical boundaries, and IVR for sharing resources across VSANs. These features enable the consolidation of an organization’s data assets into fewer, larger, and more manageable SANs, thus reducing the hardware footprint and associated capital and operating expenses.

Enterprise-Class Availability

The Cisco MDS 9700 Series was designed from the beginning for high availability. Beyond meeting the basic requirements of nondisruptive software upgrades and redundancy of all critical hardware components, the Cisco MDS 9700 Series software architecture offers outstanding availability.

Virtual Machine-Aware SAN Deployment

Growing adoption of server virtualization in the data center increases the number of hosts attached to the SAN, places higher workloads on the SAN, requires more storage, and increases the need for SAN services. Cisco VMpath technology, part of Cisco Prime DCNM, provides end-to-end visibility from the virtual machine to the storage, with resource allocation, performance measurements, and predictions available on a per-virtual machine basis to enable rapid troubleshooting in mission-critical virtualized environments.

Advanced Traffic Management

Advanced traffic management capabilities integrated into every Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module simplify deployment and optimization of large-scale fabrics.

●   Virtual output queue (VOQ): Helps ensure line-rate performance on each port, independent of traffic pattern, by eliminating head-of-line blocking

●   Up to 4095 buffer-to-buffer credits: Can be assigned to any individual port for optimal bandwidth utilization across distance

●   PortChannels: Allow you to aggregate up to 16 physical ISLs into a single logical bundle, providing optimized bandwidth utilization across all links; the bundle can be a mix of any port from any module in the chassis, helping ensure that the bundle can remain active even in the event of a module failure

●   Fabric Shortest Path First (FSPF)-based multipathing: Provides the intelligence to load-balance across up to 16 equal-cost paths and dynamically reroute traffic in the event of a switch failure

●   QoS: Helps manage bandwidth and control latency to prioritize critical traffic; available on every port

●   Lossless networkwide in-order delivery guarantee: The Cisco MDS 9700 Series switch architecture in essence guarantees that frames can never be reordered within a switch; this guarantee extends across an entire multiswitch fabric, assuming that the fabric is stable and that no topology changes are made

Advanced Diagnostics and Troubleshooting Tools

The Cisco MDS 9700 Series integrates proactive diagnostics, tools to verify connectivity and route latency, and mechanisms for capturing and analyzing traffic, helping simplify the management of large-scale storage networks. The power-on self-test (POST) and online diagnostics provide proactive health monitoring. Starting with Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS 6.2, the powerful Cisco Generic Online Diagnostics (GOLD) framework replaces the Cisco Online Health Management System (OHMS) diagnostic framework on the new Cisco MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Director chassis. Cisco GOLD is a suite of diagnostic facilities to verify that hardware and internal data paths are operating as designed. Boot-time diagnostics, continuous monitoring, standby fabric loopback tests, and on-demand and scheduled tests are part of the Cisco GOLD feature set. This industry-leading diagnostics subsystem enables the rapid fault isolation and continuous system monitoring critical in today's continuously operating environments. Integrated hardware functions enable diagnostic capabilities such as Fibre Channel traceroute to identify the exact path and timing of flows, and Cisco Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) and Remote SPAN (RSPAN) to intelligently capture network traffic. Captured Fibre Channel traffic can be analyzed with the embedded Cisco Fabric Analyzer. Comprehensive port-based and flow-based statistics enable sophisticated performance analysis and service-level agreement (SLA) accounting.

Comprehensive Solution for Robust Security

Addressing the need for stringent security in storage networks, the Cisco MDS 9700 Series 16-Gbps Fibre Channel line card offers an extensive security framework to protect the highly sensitive data crossing today’s enterprise networks. The Cisco MDS 9700 Series employs intelligent packet inspection at the port level, including the application of ACLs for hardware enforcement of zones, VSANs, and advanced port security features. VSANs are used to achieve higher security and greater stability by providing complete isolation of devices that are connected to the same physical SAN. IVR enables controlled sharing of resources between VSANs. In addition, FC-SP¹ provides switch-to-switch and host-to-switch Diffie-Hellman Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (DH‑CHAP) authentication supporting RADIUS or TACACS+ to help ensure that only authorized devices access protected storage networks. Cisco TrustSec¹ Fibre Channel link encryption, available on the Cisco MDS 9700 Series 16-Gbps modules, allows you to transparently encrypt ISLs at up to line-rate speeds, providing an additional layer of protection for traffic within and between data centers. The Cisco MDS 9700 Series supports a fabric binding feature that helps ensure that ISLs are enabled only between specified switches in the fabric binding configuration.

Integrated Mainframe Support

The Cisco MDS 9710 and Cisco MDS 9706 is mainframe ready, with full support for IBM System z FICON and Linux environments. The Cisco MDS 9710 and Cisco MDS 9706  supports transport of the FICON protocol in both cascaded and noncascaded fabrics, as well as an intermix of FICON and open systems Fibre Channel Protocol traffic on the same switch.

Product Specifications

Table 1 lists the product specifications for the Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Modules.

Table 1.       Technical Specifications

Ordering Information

Table 2 provides ordering information for the Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module.

Table 2.       Ordering Information

For More Information

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

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