Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director

Transform Large Storage Networks

The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director brings superior performance, scalability, multiprotocol convergence, integrated analytics, and enterprise-grade availability to data center SANs. With it, you can deploy Fibre Channel, IBM Fibre Connectivity (FICON), Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and NVMe over Fibre Channel on a single fabric. This director meets the stringent requirements of large virtualized storage environments.

Features and Capabilities

High Performance and Scalability

The Cisco MDS 9710 is designed to meet the performance and scalability needs of the most demanding SANs while also lowering the TCO. It offers:

• Up to 24-Tbps front-panel Fibre Channel switching capacity
• 1.5-Tbps front-panel Fibre Channel performance per slot
• Industry-leading port densities of up to 384 32/16/10/8/4/2-Gbps autosensing line-rate Fibre Channel, or 384 10-Gbps FcoE, or 192 40-Gbps FCoE ports per chassis
• Up to 64 10-Gbps FCIP ports and 16 40-Gbps FCIP ports on MDS 9710
• Integrated hardware-based analytics support with 32G module

Lower TCO and Outstanding Investment Protection

The Cisco MDS 9710 is optimized for the data center and delivers a lower TCO. It features:

• Very high density 32-Gbps FC and 10/40-Gbps FCoE connectivity
• Investment protection for more than a decade
• True front-to-back air flow for hot-cold aisle deployments

Designed to grow with your storage environment, the Cisco MDS 9710 provides smooth migration, common sparing, and outstanding investment protection.

Enterprise-Class Availability

The Cisco MDS 9710 provides:

• Industry's first redundancy on all major hardware components, including the supervisor and fabric modules as well as the power supplies
• Availability in the software architecture through nondisruptive software upgrades, automatic process restarts, and stateful supervisor failover

Converged Networks to Simplify SAN Connectivity

Using the Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director, you can easily connect a Cisco MDS-based SAN infrastructure to large converged networks with multihop FCoE. In addition, the operating system and management interface are the same as that of all other Cisco data center switches.

Specifications at a Glance

Minimum Software Requirements

• Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS Software Release 6.2(9) or later

Port Types

• 48-port Fibre Channel module supporting 4/8/16/32-Gbps autosensing (optionally configurable) Fibre Channel ports
• 48-port FC module supporting 2/4/8/16-Gbps autosensing (optionally configurable) and 10-Gbps fixed rate FC ports
• 48-port FCoE module with 10-Gbps FCoE ports
• 24-port FCoE module with 40-Gbps FCoE ports
• 24/10 SAN extension module with 24 ports at 2/4/8/10/16 Gigabit Ethernet Fibre Channel, 8 ports at 1/10 GE, and 2 ports at 40 GE for FCIP
• NVMe over Fibre Channel support on all ports

Advanced Functionality

• Virtual SAN (VSAN)
• Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR)
• PortChannel with multipath load balancing
• Flow- and zone-based quality of service (QoS)
• N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV)
• Integrated Analytics

Reliability and Availability

• Online, nondisruptive software upgrades
• Stateful, nondisruptive supervisor module failover
• Hot-swappable redundant supervisor, fabric, and switching modules

Additional Resources