Heightened security concerns and regulatory mandates are forcing large companies to reevaluate their business-continuance and disaster-recovery policies and to seek efficient, fault-tolerant alternatives for transporting their storage. Through its Multiservice over SONET/SDH (MSOS) strategy, Cisco Systems enables enterprises to build reliable SAN Extension models to efficiently interconnect their SAN islands, and achieve their fault-tolerance targets.
With Cisco MSOS, service providers can now offer SAN Extension services, in addition to the traditional TDM, OC-n, and Ethernet service, all without extensive equipment upgrades or infrastructure impact. Furthermore, those carriers currently offering managed storage services can migrate to a more-profitable services model by taking advantage of their existing SONET/SDH infrastructure investments to deliver SAN Extension services. The Cisco SL-Series card for the Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Provisioning Platform (MSPP) offers service providers and enterprises the opportunity to deliver Fibre Channel and FICON over SONET/SDH infrastructures. Line-rate support for 1-Gbps and 2-Gbps Fibre Channel interfaces, flexible interface options, and interoperability with the Cisco MDS Family, allow the SL-Series to deliver complete, SAN Extension solutions without restrictions.