Accelerate I/O Traffic Across MAN or WAN Links
The Cisco I/O Accelerator (IOA) provides a fabric-based, highly integrated, topology-independent acceleration service to improve remote I/O performance and bandwidth utilization over metropolitan and wide area networks.
The accelerator is implemented on the Cisco SSN-16 Storage Services Node, the Cisco MDS 9000 18/4-Port Multiservice Module, and the Cisco MDS 9222i Multiservice Modular Switch. Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS Software Version 4.2 or later is required.
Features
- IOA speeds up SCSI disk writes and SCSI tape reads and writes over MANs and WANs
- It is deployed as a fabric-based service, so the accelerator service nodes can be located anywhere in the fabrics on each side of the remote link
- Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) links take advantage of the encryption and compression built into the supporting hardware
- Inter-Switch Links (ISLs) between a pair of 8-Gbps-capable line cards can use Cisco TrustSec FC Link Encryption to secure data sent between data centers
- IOA can add compression to MAN traffic
- It is simple to install and manage with a Fabric Manager wizard that simplifies configuring the infrastructure on each side of the MAN-WAN link
- Insertion of the acceleration service into the data path is transparent and nondisruptive
