MDS 9509 Multilayer Director

High Availability

The Cisco MDS 9509 Multilayer Director was designed from the beginning for high availability. Beyond meeting the basic requirements of nondisruptive software upgrades and redundancy of all critical hardware components, the Cisco MDS 9509 software architecture offers an unparalleled level of availability. The Cisco MDS 9500 Series supervisor modules have the unique ability to automatically restart failed processes, making it exceptionally robust. In the rare event that a supervisor module is reset, complete synchronization between the active and standby supervisor modules ensures stateful failover with no disruption to traffic.

High availability is implemented at the fabric level using robust and high-performance Inter-Switch Links (ISLs). PortChannel capability allows users to aggregate up to 16 physical links into one logical bundle. The bundle can consist of any speed-matched ports in the chassis, ensures that the bundle remains active in the event of a port, application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), or module failure. The Cisco MDS 9509 Multilayer Director takes high availability to a new level, ensuring solutions that exceed the 99.999 percent uptime requirements of today's most demanding environments.

Scalable Expansion with Maximum Investment Protection

Using Cisco MDS 9000 Family switching modules, the Cisco MDS 9509 supports from 24 to 336 1/2/4/8-Gbps auto-sensing Fibre Channel ports, from 4 to 28 10-Gbps Fibre Channel ports, and from 4 to 100 1-Gbps Ethernet ports in a 9-slot modular chassis. The Cisco MDS 9509 provides up to 1008 Fibre Channel ports in a single rack. With 1.4 Tbps of internal bandwidth, the Cisco MDS 9509 easily supports 1/2/4/8-Gbps and 10-Gbps.

The Cisco MDS 9509 provides the highest possible level of system commonality. All Cisco MDS 9000 Family Fibre Channel Switching Modules are compatible with each Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Director. Designed to grow with your storage environment, the Cisco MDS 9509 provides smooth migration, common sparing, and outstanding investment protection.

Virtual Machine Transparency

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 they run on are not bounded by physical servers and network ports. The Cisco MDS 9000 Family provides deterministic hardware performance and a rich feature set that allows virtual machines to have the same SAN attributes as a physical server. On a per-virtual machine basis, the MDS 9000 Family NX-OS offers VSANs, QoS policies, access control, performance monitoring, and data protection to promote the scalability and mobility of virtual machines.

Virtual SANs

Ideal for efficient, secure SAN consolidation, VSANs allow more efficient storage network utilization by creating hardware-based isolated environments with a single physical SAN fabric or switch. Each VSAN can be zoned as a typical SAN and maintains its own fabric services for added scalability and resilience. VSANs allow the cost of SAN infrastructure to be shared among more users, while ensuring absolute segregation of traffic and retaining independent control of configuration on a VSAN-by-VSAN basis.

Integrated SAN Routing

In another step toward deploying efficient, cost-effective, consolidated storage networks, the Cisco MDS 9509 Multilayer Director supports IVR, the industry's first routing functionality for Fibre Channel. IVR allows selective transfer of data between specific initiators and targets on different VSANs while maintaining isolation of control traffic within each VSAN. With IVR, data can transit VSAN boundaries while maintaining control plane isolation, thereby maintaining fabric stability and availability. Integrated IVR eliminates the need for external routing appliances, greatly increasing routing scalability while delivering line-rate routing performance, simplifying management, and eliminating the challenges associated with maintaining separate systems. Integrated IVR means lower total cost of SAN ownership.

Multiprotocol Intelligence

As with all Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors, the MDS 9509 architecture enables multilayer and multiprotocol functionality, allowing it to transparently integrate multiple transport technologies for maximum flexibility. Beginning with Fibre Channel, FICON, iSCSI, and FCIP, the Cisco MDS 9509 is a robust multiprotocol platform designed for deployment of cost-optimized storage networks. Users can implement up to 10-Gbps Fibre Channel or FICON for high-performance applications, iSCSI over Ethernet for cost-effective connectivity to shared storage pools, and FCIP for connectivity between data centers.

Cisco Storage Media Encryption

The services provided by Cisco Storage Media Encryption (SME) are mandatory in today's storage area networks as a result of enactment of recent regulations that require companies to store and protect data at rest for a specified number of years while publicly disclosing security breaches. Cisco SME enables data on tapes and VTLs to be compressed, encrypted, and authenticated for centralized security management and data management and recovery. Cisco SME is supported on the Cisco MDS 9000 16-Pport Gigabit Ethernet Storage Services Node (SSN) or the Cisco MDS 9000 18/4-Port Multiservice Module (MSM). Cisco SME services employ clustering technology to create a highly available solution. The cryptographic cluster formed enhances reliability and availability, provides automated load balancing and failover capabilities, and simplifies provisioning as a single SAN fabric service rather than as individual switches or modules. The Cisco Key Management Center (KMC) provides comprehensive key management for Cisco SME, with support for single- and multiple-site deployments. Cisco KMC provides essential features such as key archival, secure export and import and translation for distribution, and key shredding. Cisco SME can also be combined with RSA Key Manager for the Datacenter from RSA, the Security Division of EMC, to provide a highly capable offering for securing data on tape.

Cisco Data Mobility Manager

The Cisco Data Mobility Manager (DMM) is a fabric-based data migration solution that transfers block data nondisruptively across heterogeneous storage volumes and across distances, whether the host is online or offline. This data-center class solution helps minimize the challenges experienced in migrating data, such as downtime, the need to add data migration software to servers, and the potential for data loss and corruption. Enabling the Cisco DMM feature on the Cisco MDS 9000 18/4-Port Multiservice Module or the Cisco MDS 9000 32-Port Storage Services Modules (SSMs) located anywhere in the SAN allows data migration to be configured without host agents, without rewiring, with minimal effect on performance, and without downtime.

Cisco MDS 9000 Secure Erase

The Cisco MDS 9000 Secure Erase capability is a SAN fabric-based service that uses an array of industry-standard algorithms to erase existing data on a Logical Unit Number (LUN) on a storage array. Upon completion of the secure erase operation, the LUN can be repurposed for another application or infrastructure tenant, or the disks containing the LUN can be disposed of with confidence. A completion log can be generated for compliance purposes. The Cisco MDS 9000 Secure Erase feature can be enabled on the Cisco MDS 9000 18/4-Port Multiservice Module or Cisco MDS 9000 SSN-16 Storage Services Node for storage arrays located anywhere in the SAN.