SAN JOSE, Calif. – April 24, 2013 – As trends such as cloud computing, Big Data, and the Internet of Things generate rapidly increasing amounts of data for organizations and users to process and store, IT functions face an ever-increasing demand for better data storage systems capable of coping with these trends. To help them, Cisco today announced new solutions for storage area networks (SANs) that deliver higher performance, scalability and reliability than other competing systems. The new solutions include the Cisco® MDS 9710 Multilayer Director, which delivers three times the bandwidth of any storage director in the industry. Cisco also announced the Cisco MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch, which improves efficiency by performing important storage networking services in the SAN fabric.

Demand from enterprises for data storage systems is growing rapidly. IDC estimates (March 2012) that data storage needs will grow at an annual compound growth rate of 61.4 percent through 2015. As storage systems grow, so too does the need to better integrate these systems with other critical data center infrastructure such as networking and computing systems.  Cisco calls its strategy for delivering this close integration the Unified Data Center.

Cisco’s storage switching offerings are critical components of the industry’s most advanced and broadest end-to-end data center networking portfolio — a portfolio spanning storage directors, switches, servers, central management and the company’s common operating system, NX-OS. Together, this portfolio helps a wide range of industries, from companies needing faster access to business metrics for better decision making, to medical caregivers accessing information on-demand in examination, treatment, surgical, and patient rooms.

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

New Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director

The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director establishes a new benchmark for performance — delivering 24 terabits per second of total switching capacity, almost three times the bandwidth of any director in the industry.

• Supports both high-density Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet, enabling consistent SAN and LAN networking operations.
• Provides storage connectivity for mission-critical applications, massive amounts of data, solid state drives (SSD) and cloud-based environments without impacting current IT operations.
• Designed for growth without rip-and-replace upgrades, with 24 Tbps of total switching capacity for Fibre Channel that can support growth of any organization beyond what it needs today.
• The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director builds on the MDS heritage of nonstop operations, including software upgrades, by providing the highest fault-tolerant capabilities with fully redundant (N+1) fans, switching fabrics, and power-supplies or grid redundancy (N:N).
• Enabling scalability for any SAN with the new 48-port 16 GB Fibre Channel and 48-port 10 GB FCoE line cards, the Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director supports up to 384 line-rate 16 GB Fibre Channel ports or FCoE in a single 14 RU chassis.
• Operational consistency is provided across the data center, enabling customers to use staff knowledge and existing processes to minimize change management when migrating to new platforms.

New Cisco MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch

The Cisco MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch delivers storage services, including Cisco I/O accelerator and Data Mobility Manager, which improve SAN efficiency by performing important storage services centrally in the fabric. This architecture reduces the time and resources required to perform common storage management functions and simplifies and accelerates data protection for regulatory compliance.

• Offers up to 40 line-rate ports of 16GB FC/FICON, 8 ports of 10 GE FCoE, and 2 ports of 1/10GE FCIP/iSCSI, while delivering a rich set of storage services via licensing.
• SAN Extension simplifies data protection and business continuance strategies by enabling backup, remote replication, and other disaster-recovery services over WAN distances using open-standards FCIP tunneling.
• Cisco I/O Accelerator (IOA) provides acceleration for MAN/WAN applications, and wire encryption for backup and replication operations, making disaster recovery and regulatory compliance much easier.
• The Cisco Data Mobility Manager provides the ability to migrate data easily from LUN to LUN or array to array, quickly and without disruption of access to the data.

Availability

The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director is available now; the Cisco MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch is scheduled to be available in Q3 2013. Cisco’s MDS Storage Networking product line is supported and resold by authorized original storage manufacturers.

SUPPORTING QUOTES

“As the leading IT service provider in Norway, we look to Cisco as a key technology partner to support us in the process of consolidating and upgrading data centers. We require storage networks to support the next generation services and level of availability our customers demand,” said Jo Marius Pedersen, SAN specialist, EVRY.  “The converged management, predictable high performance, flexibility and reliability of the 16 GB optimized Cisco MDS Multilayer 9710 has through thorough testing shown unprecedented results. The changing technology landscape, with its exponential data growth and increasing pressure to reduce cost and complexity, forces us to constantly balance innovative and known solutions. We can definitely recommend businesses with similar challenges to evaluate the innovative MDS platform.”

“Today’s announcement cements Cisco’s technology leadership in the storage director market,” said David Yen, senior vice president, Data Center Group, Cisco. “Cisco continues to deliver the greatest depth and breadth for an end-to-end data center unified fabric. Together with our ecosystem of partners, we are reshaping the data center into an IT linchpin that transforms business continuity and operations for customers, one that is critical to today’s competitive business environments.”

SUPPORTING RESOURCES

• Read: Cisco Data Center blog
• Blog:  Raising the Bar for Storage Networks
• Learn More: Cisco Storage innovations announced today
• Register for the May 16, 2013 webcast
• Cisco Data Center Services

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected. For ongoing news, please go to http://thenetwork.cisco.com.