Cisco MDS 9000 Family Storag

The Cisco MDS 9000 Family Storage Services Module (Figure 1) includes the following features:

• Fibre Channel switching

• Fibre Channel Write Acceleration (FC-WA) and Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) flow-statistics monitoring

• Network-Accelerated Serverless Backup with standards-based  DWDM-XFP-54.13= COPY command.

• Network-Assisted Storage Applications with the SANTap protocol

• Network-Hosted Storage Applications with the Fabric Application Interface Standard (FAIS)-based Intelligent Storage Application Programmatic Interface (ISAPI)

Figure 1. Cisco MDS 9000 Family Storage Services Module

KEY FEATURES AND BENEFITS

Fibre Channel Switching

Includes 32 ports of Fibre Channel switching so no compromise between port density and I/O performance is necessary.

Fibre Channel Write Acceleration

Designed for synchronous data replication, FC-WA reduces the effective latency between data centers to dramatically enhance the performance and/or increase the distance of synchronous data-replication deployments. Additionally, with the embedded SCSI flow services, SCSI flows are monitored for statistics gathering.

Network-Accelerated Serverless Backup

The Cisco Storage Services Module provides a high-speed network-accelerated serverless backup interface through SCSI-2 EXTENDED COPY to allow backup and recovery applications to use the network for the data movement, without changing the existing backup environment. The I/O and processing is offloaded from the media server, resulting in more efficient backups, fewer media servers, and reduced server and administration tasks.