Your data center infrastructure must evolve rapidly to improve resiliency, increase business responsiveness, and keep up with the growing demands of new applications while reducing overall power consumption. Storage costs are growing faster than server costs, increasing the need for efficient and cost-effective storage area networks. In highly competitive environments that comply with government regulations for data recovery, 24-hour access to critical information is imperative.
Cisco solutions for storage area networks provide:
Investment protection: First, second, and third generations can all coexist in existing customer chassis and new switch configurations.
Virtualization: IT managers can provision their storage infrastructure.
Security: Your data is protected when it is at rest and while it is being transported and replicated.
Consolidation: Storage professionals can consolidate resources by taking advantage of highly scalable, intelligent SAN platforms.
Availability: You have instantaneous access to data from multiple tiers, for disaster recovery.
Storage area networks are central to the Cisco Data Center 3.0 architecture, providing a networking platform that helps IT departments achieve lower total cost of ownership, enhanced resiliency, and greater agility through Cisco data center storage solutions.
The Cisco Unified Computing System unites network, compute, and virtualization resources into a single seamless system to reduce TCO and increase business agility.
Offers F-port trunking and F-port channeling with N_port virtualization
Increase Data Center Efficiency
Data center managers want to increase the efficiency of their data centers by reducing power and cooling requirements, increasing overall use of servers and applications, isolating application traffic, and addressing security issues related to data integrity.
Cisco storage networking solutions addresses these requirements by:
The core attributes of Cisco storage networking solutions are:
Virtual-machine-optimized SAN: Optimization of virtual machines addresses the growing challenges of consolidation, space constraints, and high demand for power and cooling. The Cisco MDS Family provides virtual-machine-optimized services that let IT managers dynamically respond to changing business demands.
Consolidation: SAN consolidation decreases the total number of physical devices without affecting performance, by using technologies and designs that advance higher efficiencies and resource use. The Cisco MDS Family's intuitive features facilitate large-scale SAN consolidation without compromising performance, scalability, or availability while lowering total cost of ownership (TCO).
Security: Cisco Storage Media Encryption (SME) encrypts data on heterogeneous tape devices and virtual tape libraries. SME is completely integrated with Cisco MDS Family switches and Cisco Fabric Manager. You can deploy and manage encryption services without rewiring, reconfiguring SANs, or installing additional software.
Disaster recovery: Cost-effective remote backup and recovery solutions from Cisco allow uninterrupted access to data, help your business meet performance metrics, and provide security for backup applications.
Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors share a common architecture, the Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS operating system, and switching and services modules that are backward and forward compatible throughout all Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors and 9200 Series Multilayer Fabric Switches.
These cost-effective, scalable, easy-to-install, and highly configurable Fibre Channel switches are ideal for small to medium-sized businesses. The fabric switches are also available as blade switch form-factors for market-leading blade servers, including IBM and HP blade servers.
Applications such as continuous data replication, Cisco Storage Media Encryption (SME), Cisco MDS Data Mobility Manager (DMM), and network-based volume management address customer concerns related to storage provisioning, security, data migration and replication, backup and recovery, storage utilization, and increasing storage costs.
Complete, unified management capabilities are available for the Cisco MDS 9000 Family Cisco device and fabric management software, combined with leading SAN management and storage resource management software, provides all features needed to rapidly install, configure, manage, and troubleshoot the Cisco MDS 9000 Family.
Build Scalable, Secure SAN Solutions
Cisco and its storage partners provide tested and validated solutions that help customers efficiently create high-performance storage environments. With these joint solutions, customers can accelerate deployment, reduce risk, and cut preproduction testing time and costs.
Storage Partners
To test and validate data center and SAN solutions, Cisco works closely with mulitple partners:
Improving Business-Process Flow
(PDF - 650 KB) Cisco MDS 9000 family switches make the Oracle 11i environment easy to deploy, upgrade, manage, and scale.
Mixing Traffic on the Same SAN
The Cisco MDS 9000 product line delivers the benefits of IBM FICON intermix without sacrificing traffic separation and resilience.
The Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition collaborates to provide business-ready IT to help your organization simplify and accelerate the transition to a private cloud infrastructure.
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Learn how the Cisco MDS 9000 Family provides a leading high-density, high-bandwidth storage networking solution and integrated-fabric applications to support dynamic data center requirements.
> Read White Paper
Fibre Channel over Ethernet
Fibre Channel over Ethernet facilitates consolidation of I/O in the data center, allowing Fibre Channel and Ethernet networks to share a single, integrated infrastructure.
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Statement of Direction
The Cisco MDS statement of direction is a quick summary of the Cisco Storage Networking Solutions portfolio that also describes ongoing research and development efforts.
> Read More (PDF - 204 KB)
