Cisco announced next-generation storage area networking (SAN) additions for its Data Center portfolio. According to the EMC Digital Universe Study with research and analysis by IDC, April 2014, data produced will grow 10 times by 2020, from 4.4ZB today to 44ZB; 32 billion Internet of Things devices will be connected to the Internet; 40 percent of data will be touched by cloud; and enterprises will have liability and responsibility for 85 percent of all data. To better manage the resulting performance, scale, and operational management challenges, Cisco continues to innovate multi-protocol storage networking solutions for its unified data center portfolio that merge data center networking and compute functions into one data center fabric, for more efficient business operations and end-to-end management.
Cisco has made a strong investment in its SAN product portfolio to meet performance, reliability, scalability, and flexibility requirements for the decade ahead. With more than 125,000 storage networking switches installed at over 20,000 customer sites, the Cisco MDS portfolio offers the highest investment protection and reliability for customer data storage networks.
Cisco introduced the first two members of its 16G fibre channel family- Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director and MDS 9250i Multiservice Switch in 2013. With today’s announcement of the Cisco MDS 9148S Multilayer Fabric Switch, Cisco MDS 9706 Director, and the Cisco MDS 9700 FCoE module, Cisco has a complete 16G portfolio from top-of-rack small SAN switches to the largest SAN products. Furthermore, Cisco provides a complete end-to-end unified data center fabric that is powered by the same NX-OS operating system across its award-winning product line–Cisco Nexus® for data center Ethernet networking, Cisco MDS for storage networking, and Cisco UCS® for compute.
“The Cisco MDS 9000 Series has been an extremely stable and consistent product line over 10 years,” said John Praet, principal storage architect, Crawford & Company. “We’re confident that the MDS 9700 series switch will deliver similar longevity and return on investment, with a lot of flexibility.”
The Banco Nacional de Costa Rica is the largest bank in Costa Rica and Central America. Its network supports 170 offices and more than 400 ATMs across the country. “We deployed the Cisco MDS Series Multilayer Directors to move from a physical infrastructure to a virtualized environment for greater flexibility and scalability, and the ability to easily segment our SAN environment for higher availability,” said Christian Campos Chinchilla, storage architect for Banco Nacional de Costa Rica. “We look forward to Cisco’s latest MDS offerings, which will offer industry-leading high performance, investment protection and multi-protocol support for cloud deployments.”
