Product Overview
The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 32-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module delivers predictable performance, scalability, and innovative features to support private and virtualized data centers.
With industry-leading 768 line-rate 32-Gbps Fibre Channel ports per director, the 32-Gbps 48-port Fibre Channel switching module meets the high-performance needs for flash-memory and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) over Fibre Channel workloads.
It offers innovative services including virtual machine awareness, on-board Fibre Channel analytics engine, E-port and F-port diagnostics, integrated VSANs, Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR), and port channels. It delivers full-duplex aggregate performance of 1536 Gbps, making it well suited for high-speed 32-Gbps storage subsystems, 32-Gbps Inter-Switch Links (ISLs), high-performance virtualized servers, and all-flash and NVMe arrays.
Figure 1. Cisco MDS 9700 License 48-Port 32-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module
The MDS 9700 License 48-Port 32-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module enables administrators to scale and consolidate SAN deployments with fewer hardware components. Your SAN administrators can consolidate workloads from hundreds of high-performance virtual machines and scale them with incremental updates as your SAN grows while protecting your existing investment.
This switching module ships with a built-in analytics engine. The engine can analyze real-time Fibre Channel exchanges and report on various metrics in detail, enabling comprehensive and timely monitoring of any potential performance problems among SAN edge devices.
The on-board network processing unit (NPU) in the module allows I/O-level metrics to be computed at every switch. The NPU can monitor all flows on all ports at line rate. The NPU examines every exchange passing through the 32-Gbps application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) to capture flow metrics such as exchange completion time, maximum number of outstanding exchanges, data access latency, read and write I/O operations per second (IOPS), throughput, logical unit number (LUN) access pattern (sequential or random), and I/O block sizes.
The switching module is hot swappable and compatible with 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-Gbps Fibre Channel interfaces. This module also supports hot-swappable Enhanced Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP+) transceivers. Individual ports can be configured with Cisco 32-, 16-, and 8-Gbps SFP+ transceivers. Each port supports 500 buffer credits for exceptional extensibility without the need for additional licenses. With the Cisco Enterprise Package license, up to 8191 buffer credits can be allocated to an individual port, enabling full link bandwidth over long distances with no degradation in link utilization.
The 32-Gbps Fibre Channel switching module also provides existing features such as predictable performance, high availability, advanced traffic management capabilities, integrated VSAN and IVR, resilient high-performance ISLs, hardware-assisted slow-drain support, comprehensive security frameworks, fault detection and isolation of errored packets, and sophisticated diagnostics.
Main Features
The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 32-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module offers the following main features:
- Outstanding SAN performance: The combination of the 32-Gbps Fibre Channel switching module and Fabric-1 crossbar switching modules enables up to 1.5 terabits per second (Tbps) of Fibre Channel throughput between the modules in each direction for each payload slot in the
- Cisco MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Directors. The MDS 9700 Series architecture, which is based on central arbitration and a crossbar fabric, provides 32-Gbps line-rate, nonblocking, predictable performance across all traffic conditions for every port in the chassis.
- High availability: The MDS 9700 Series directors provide outstanding availability and reliability. They are the industry’s first director-class switches considered to support mission-critical workloads because they enable redundancy on all major components, including the fabric card. They also provide grid redundancy on the power supply and 1+1 redundant supervisors. Users can add a fabric card to enable N+1 fabric redundancy at 16-Gbps Fibre Channel speeds.
- Industry-leading scalability: The MDS 9700 Series directors combine industry-leading scalability with performance to meet the needs of even the largest data center storage environments. The Cisco MDS 9718 Multilayer Director supports up to 48 Tbps of Fibre Channel system bandwidth and 768 2-, 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-Gbps full line-rate autosensing Fibre Channel ports in a single chassis. The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director supports up to 24 Tbps of Fibre Channel system bandwidth and up to 384 2-, 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-Gbps full line-rate autosensing Fibre Channel ports in a single chassis. The smaller Cisco MDS 9706 Multilayer Director supports up to 12 Tbps of Fibre Channel system bandwidth and 192 2-, 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-Gbps full line-rate autosensing Fibre Channel ports in a single chassis. The MDS 9700 Series directors can support both the Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module and the Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 32-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module in the same chassis, providing compatibility with the customer’s existing system.
Main Benefits
The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 32-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module offers the following main benefits:
• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) with SAN consolidation: With the exponential growth of data in today’s business environment, organizations need to deploy large-scale SANs in the most efficient and cost-effective ways. To meet scalability requirements while managing TCO, the MDS 9700 Series directors offer the following.
- Industry-leading port density of line-rate 32-Gbps Fibre Channel ports per chassis.
- 1.5-Tbps Fibre Channel performance per slot.
- Up to 48-Tbps front-panel Fibre Channel line-rate nonblocking system-level switching.
- Exceptional capabilities with intelligent fabric services.
- VSANs for consolidating individual physical SAN islands while maintaining logical boundaries.
- IVR for sharing resources across VSANs.
- Built-in network processing unit for inline analytics.
- These features enable the consolidation of an organization’s data assets into fewer, larger, and more manageable SANs, thus reducing the hardware footprint and associated capital and operating expenses.
• Enterprise-class availability: The MDS 9700 Series was specifically designed from the beginning for high-availability and mission-critical environments. Beyond meeting the basic requirements of nondisruptive software upgrades and redundancy of all critical hardware components, the MDS 9700 Series software architecture offers outstanding greater than five-nines availability.
• Virtual machine–aware SAN deployment: The growing adoption of server virtualization in data centers increases the number of hosts attached to the SAN, places higher workloads on the SAN, and requires more storage, thereby increasing the need for SAN services. The Cisco VMpath technology, part of Cisco Prime DCNM, provides end-to-end visibility from the virtual machines to the storage devices. Resource allocation, performance measurements, and predictions are available on a per-virtual machine basis to enable rapid troubleshooting in mission-critical virtualized environments.
• Advanced traffic management: The following advanced traffic management capabilities, integrated into every MDS 9700 48-Port 32-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module, simplify deployment and optimization of large-scale fabrics:
- The virtual output queue (VOQ) helps ensure line-rate performance on each port, independent of traffic pattern, by eliminating head-of-line blocking.
- Up to 8191 buffer-to-buffer credits can be assigned to any individual port for optimal bandwidth utilization across distances.
- Port channels allow up to 16 physical ISLs to be aggregated into a single logical bundle, providing optimized bandwidth utilization across all links. The bundle can be a mix of any port from any module in the chassis. This approach helps ensures that the bundle can remain active even if a module fails.
- Fabric Shortest Path First (FSPF)-based multipathing provides the intelligence to load-balance across up to 16 equal-cost paths and dynamically reroute traffic if a switch fails.
- QoS helps manage bandwidth and control latency to prioritize critical traffic and is available on every port.
- The lossless networkwide in-order delivery guarantee helps ensure that frames are never reordered within a switch. This guarantee extends across the entire multiswitch fabric, assuming that the fabric is stable and no topology changes are made.
• Advanced diagnostics and troubleshooting tools: The MDS 9700 Series integrates proactive diagnostics, tools to verify connectivity and route latency and to capture and analyze traffic, thereby simplifying the management of large-scale storage networks. The power-on self-test (POST) and online diagnostics provide proactive health monitoring. Starting with Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS Software Release 6.2, the powerful Cisco Generic Online Diagnostics (GOLD) framework replaces the Cisco Online Health Management System (OHMS) diagnostic framework on the new MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Director chassis.
GOLD is a suite of diagnostic facilities that verify whether the hardware and internal data paths are operating as designed. Boot-time diagnostics, continuous monitoring, standby fabric loopback tests, and on-demand and scheduled tests are part of the GOLD feature set. This industry-leading diagnostics subsystem enables rapid fault isolation and continuous system monitoring, which are critical features in today’s continuously operating environments.
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