Cisco MDS 9706 SAN Switch Chassis

The Cisco® MDS 9706 Multilayer Director is a director-class SAN switch designed for deployment in small to medium-sized storage networks to support enterprise clouds and business transformation. It layers a comprehensive set of intelligent features onto a high-performance, protocol-independent switch fabric.

The MDS 9706 addresses the stringent requirements of large virtualized data center storage environments. It delivers uncompromising availability, security, scalability, ease of management, and transparent integration of new technologies for extremely flexible data center SAN solutions. It shares the same operating system and management interface with other Cisco data center switches. The MDS 9706 lets you transparently deploy unified fabrics with Fibre Channel, IBM Fibre Connection (FICON), and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connectivity with a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Main features

The MDS 9706 offers a number of important features.

Lower TCO with SAN consolidation

Organizations need efficient, cost-effective SANs to keep up with today's exponential data growth. The MDS 9706 lets you easily consolidate data assets into fewer, larger, and more manageable SANs to reduce your hardware footprint and associated Capital Expenditures (CapEx) and Operating Expenses (OpEx). It offers industry-leading scalability with:

• Up to 192 64-Gbps Fibre Channel or 10-Gbps FCoE ports or 96 40-Gbps FCoE ports per chassis
• Up to 11.5 Terabits per second (Tbps) front-panel, Fibre Channel, line-rate, nonblocking system-level switching capacity
• Exceptional capabilities with intelligent fabric services
• Virtual SANs (VSANs) for consolidating individual physical SAN islands while maintaining logical boundaries
• Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR) for sharing resources across VSANs

For unified fabric deployments with converged LAN and SAN environments using lossless Ethernet, the MDS 9706 provides multihop FCoE. Protect your organization's investments in existing storage infrastructure with any-to-any connectivity across multiple protocols.

Fully integrated SAN analytics

This best-in-class enterprise switch also offers state-of-the-art SAN analytics and telemetry capabilities that have been built into this next-generation hardware platform. This new state-of-the-art technology couples the next-generation port ASIC with a fully dedicated network processor (NPU) designed to complete analytics calculations in real time on the 64-Gbps and 32-Gbps line cards. This capability is extended due to the hardware capabilities of the 48-port 64- and 32-Gbps line cards (DS-X9748-3072K9 and DS-X9648-1536K9). The telemetry data extracted from the inspection of the frame headers are calculated on board (within the switch) and, using an industry-leading open format, can be streamed to any analytics-visualization platform.