Cisco MDS 9718 Multilayer Director

Grow and Consolidate

Gain superior performance, scalability, multiprotocol convergence, and enterprise-grade availability in your data center SAN. Our newest director offers the industry’s highest port density with 768 line-rate 32Gbps Fibre Channel ports and NVMe over Fibre Channel support. The MDS 9718 meets the stringent requirements of large virtualized storage environments.

Features and Capabilities

High Performance and Scalability

The MDS 9718 is designed to meet the performance and scalability needs of the most demanding SANs while also lowering the TCO. It offers:

• Up to 48-Tbps front-panel Fibre Channel (FC) switching capacity
• 1.5-Tbps front-panel FC performance per slot
• Up to 768 32-Gbps autosensing line-rate FC ports; 10-Gbps FCoE ports per chassis; or 24 ports of 40-Gbps FCoE
• Up to 128 10-Gbps FCIP ports
• Integrated analytics on 32G module

Lower TCO and Outstanding Investment Protection

The MDS 9718 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 MDS 9718 provides smooth migration, common sparing, and exceptional investment protection.

Enterprise-Class Availability

The MDS 9718 provides the industry's first redundancy on all major hardware components, including the supervisor and fabric modules as well as the power supplies.

It is available in a software architecture through non-disruptive software upgrades, automatic process restarts, and stateful supervisor failover.

Converged Networks to Simplify SAN Connectivity

Using the 9718 director, you can easily connect a Cisco MDS-based SAN infrastructure to large converged networks with multihop FCoE. The operating system and management interface are the same as all other Cisco data center switches.

Specifications at a Glance

Minimum Software Requirements

• Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS Software Release 7.3 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 Fiber Channel, 8 ports at 1/10 GE, and 2 ports at 40 GE for FCIP
• NVMe over Fibre Channel Support

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