Cisco MDS 9000 Family

Network-Assisted Storage Applications

SANTap is a protocol between a Cisco MDS 9000 Family switch and an appliance that allows the appliance to get an I/O copy for data replication, continuous data protection and data migration without impacting the integrity, availability, and performance of the primary I/O between servers and storage. Thus, customers can deploy network-assisted storage applications without having appliances residing in the primary data path. SANTap reduces implementation risk by facilitating gradual introduction of services for staging.

Easy insertion and provisioning of appliance-based storage applications is achieved by eliminating the service disruption caused by inserting appliances in-band. SANTap also reduces or eliminates host-side agents and makes appliance-based storage applications work across heterogeneous operating systems without creating a separate agent for each OS.

SANTap offers deployment flexibility and investment protection by enabling appliance-based storage application for any server or storage device in the SAN without rewiring. Moreover, multiple appliance-based storage applications can be concurrently added to servers and storage.

In addition, SANTap provides a scalability solution for appliance-based storage applications by allowing for distribution of workload to multiple appliances based on application and source-and-target combinations. The following storage applications intend to take advantage of these benefits:

• Kashya KBX5000

• Topio TDPS Fabric Edition

• Xiotech TimeScale™ Replication Appliance

• FalconStor IPStor with SANTap Option

Network-Hosted Storage Applications

The Cisco MDS 9000 Family network-hosted storage applications architecture overcomes the inherent bottlenecks associated with other virtualization architectures. Virtualization performance can be easily scaled to the level required by even the largest organizations. Simply adding Cisco MDS 9000 Family Storage Services Modules adds virtualization performance and host connectivity in increments of 32 ports. Because Cisco MDS 9000 Family network-hosted storage applications are switch-based, any host can access any virtual volume from anywhere in the fabric, independent of the host's attachment point in the storage area network (SAN). In addition to virtualization services, the Cisco MDS 9000 Family Storage Services Module takes advantage of all of the Fibre Channel features and services offered by other Cisco MDS 9000 Family Switching Modules, and all of the advanced SAN-OS features available on the Cisco MDS 9000 Family platform-simplifying security, diagnostics, and management. With hosts and storage devices connecting anywhere in the network, virtualization provides a single point of management, transparent data mobility and migration, improved storage utilization, and a single set of copy services across heterogeneous storage. The Cisco Storage Services Module hosts EMC Invista