Key Features and Benefits Cisco MDS 9124

Exceptional Flexibility and Scalability

The Cisco MDS 9124 offers up to 24 autosensing Fibre Channel ports capable of speeds of 4, 2, and 1 Gbps in a compact 1RU form-factor chassis. With 4 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth for each port, the Cisco MDS 9124 is designed to meet the performance and scalability requirements of the most demanding environments.

The flexibility of the Cisco MDS 9124 is provided by the Cisco MDS 9124 On-Demand Port Activation License, which allows expansion in 8-port increments. Customers can start with a base configuration of 8 ports and can upgrade onsite to 16 and 24 ports using these licenses. With advanced storage networking capabilities built into the platform, it is an ideal choice both as a standalone departmental SAN switch and as an edge switch in enterprise core-edge SANs.

The Cisco MDS 9124 includes hot-swappable, Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP), LC interfaces. All SFP interfaces are 4, 2, and 1 Gbps, with autosensing capabilities. Individual ports can be configured with either short-or long-wavelength SFP optics for connectivity up to 500 meters (m) and 10 kilometers (km), respectively.

VSANs for Segmentation and Isolation

VSAN, an industry standard for fabric virtualization capabilities, allows more efficient storage network use by creating hardware-based isolated environments within a single physical SAN fabric or switch. Upto 16 VSANs are supported per switch. Each VSAN can be zoned as a typical SAN and maintains its own fabric services and management domains for added scalability and resilience. VSANs allow the cost of SAN infrastructure to be shared among more users, while helping ensure segregation of traffic and retaining independent control of configuration on a VSAN-by-VSAN basis.

Advanced Traffic Management for High-Performance, Resilient SANs

Advanced traffic management capabilities integrated into the Cisco MDS 9124 simplify deployment and optimization of core edge fabrics.

• Virtual output queuing helps ensure line-rate performance on each port, independent of traffic pattern, by eliminating head-of-line blocking.

• Each port group consisting of 4 ports has a pool of 64 buffer credits, with a default of 16 buffer credits per port. When extended distances are required, up to 61 buffer credits can be allocated to a single port within the port group. This extensibility is available without additional licensing.

• PortChannels allow users to aggregate up to 16 physical ISLs into a single logical bundle, providing optimized bandwidth use across all links. The bundle can consist of any port from the switch, helping ensure that the bundle remains active even in the event of a port failure.

• Fabric Shortest Path First (FSPF)-based multipathing provides the intelligence to load balance across up to 16 equal-cost paths and, in the event of a switch failure, dynamically reroute traffic.

• QoS can be used to manage bandwidth and control latency, to prioritize critical traffic.

• Comprehensive port and flow statistics facilitate sophisticated performance analysis and service-level agreement (SLA) accounting.

Advanced Diagnostics and Troubleshooting Tools

Management of storage networks requires proactive diagnostics, tools to verify connectivity and route latency, and mechanisms for capturing and analyzing traffic. The Cisco MDS 9124 integrates the industry's most advanced analysis and debugging tools. Power-on self-test (POST) and online diagnostics provide proactive health monitoring. The Cisco MDS 9124 provides the integrated hardware functions required to implement diagnostic capabilities such as Fibre Channel Traceroute to detail the exact path and timing of flows and SPAN to intelligently capture network traffic. After traffic has been captured, it can be analyzed with the Cisco Fabric Analyzer, an embedded Fibre Channel analyzer. With the Cisco MDS 9124, Cisco delivers a comprehensive toolset for troubleshooting and analysis of an organization's storage network.

Comprehensive Security

Recognizing the need for unassailable security in storage networks, the Cisco MDS 9124 offers an extensive security framework to protect highly sensitive data crossing today's enterprise networks.

• VSANs are used to achieve higher security and greater stability by providing complete isolation among devices that are connected to the same physical SAN DWDM-XFP-58.17=

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• Intelligent packet inspection at the port level, including the application of access control lists (ACLs) for hardware enforcement of zones, VSANs, and advanced port security features.

• Extended zoning capabilities help ensure that broadcasts are restricted to the selected zones (the broadcast zones).

• FC-SP provides switch-to-switch and host-to-switch Diffie-Hellman Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (DH-CHAP) authentication supporting RADIUS or TACACS+, to help ensure that only authorized devices access protected storage networks.

This feature, in conjunction with management access and control plane security, makes the Cisco MDS 9000 family among the most secure platforms of its kind.