IBM MDS 9509 - Manual (Page 3)

The 48-port 8 Gbps Fibre Channel
Switching Module delivers an ideal
balance of performance and scalability.
Its 48 autosensing 1, 2, 4 and 8 Gbps
ports deliver up to 96 Gbps of full-
duplex bandwidth to meet the perform-
ance demands of enterprise-class or
highly virtualized servers. Through easy-
to-use traffic engineering capabilities,
the 48-port 8 Gbps Fibre Channel
Switching Module offers the flexibility to
provide predictable high-performance
storage and inter-switch connectivity,
fully utilizing the available bandwidth.
The 4/44-port 8 Gbps Host-
Optimized Fibre Channel Switching
Module is optimized for host connec-
tivity. The module enables storage net-
work consolidation with high-density,
cost-effective connectivity. Four 8-Gbps
ports and 44 4-Gbps ports deliver
96 Gbps of full-duplex bandwidth,
sufficient for the majority of today’s
standard servers.
4-port 10 Gbps switching module:
Configuring the switch for metro business
continuity
The 4-port 10 Gbps Fibre Channel
Switching Module is built to deliver
high-bandwidth links for metro business
continuity solutions. The module uses
hot-swappable X2 form-factor plug-
gable, SC type transceivers. The mod-
ule is well suited for ISL links between
data centers across metro optical
networks.
Port Bandwidth Reservation, available
on all switching modules, enables
switching bandwidth to be dedicated to
specific ports. This unique feature of
the Cisco MDS 9000 family enables
great flexibility in bandwidth allocation
to support a mix of applications
within a single module, including high-
performance ISLs. By combining vari-
ous switching modules in a single
modular chassis, it is possible to design
storage networks optimized for cost
and performance in a wide range
of application environments. This appli-
cation-oriented approach to port
deployment can reduce the number of
switches and ISLs required in a storage
network, in many cases eliminating the
need for core-edge network topologies.
A switch built for high availability
The Cisco MDS 9509 for IBM System
Storage combines support for non-
disruptive software upgrades, stateful
process restart/failover and redundancy
of active hardware components to sup-
port director-class availability. The
Supervisor Module-2 has the ability to
automatically restart failed processes
and complete synchronization between
the active and standby Supervisor
Modules to help support stateful failover
without disruption to traffic.
A switch for virtual servers and
applications
Server virtualization means that a SAN
must concurrently support thousands of
diverse, tiered applications, each with
unique performance requirements.
These applications and the virtual
machines (VMs) they run on are not
bounded by physical servers and net-
work ports. The Cisco MDS 9000 family
provides deterministic hardware per-
formance and a rich feature set that
allows VMs to have the same SAN
attributes as a physical server. On a
per-VM basis, the MDS 9000 family NX-
OS firmware offers Virtual SAN (VSAN)
isolation, quality of service (QoS) poli-
cies, access control, performance mon-
itoring, and data protection to enable
scalability and mobility of VMs.
A switch for virtual SANs
Ideal for efficient, secure SAN consoli-
dation, ANSI T11 compliant VSANs
allow more efficient storage network uti-
lization by creating hardware-based iso-
lated environments within a single