Cisco MDS 9513

Product Overview

The flagship of the Cisco MDS 9500 Series, the Cisco MDS 9513 Multilayer Director (Figure 1) elevates the standard for director-class switches. Providing industry-leading availability, scalability, security, and management, the Cisco MDS 9513 allows you to deploy high-performance SANs with an extremely low total cost of ownership (TCO). Layering a rich set of intelligent features onto a high-performance, protocol-independent switch fabric, the Cisco MDS 9513 addresses the stringent requirements of large data center storage environments: uncompromising high availability, security, scalability, ease of management, and transparent integration of new technologies for extremely flexible data center SAN solutions. Compatible with first-, second-, and third-generation Cisco MDS 9000 Family switching modules, the Cisco MDS 9513 provides advanced functions and outstanding investment protection, allowing the use of any Cisco MDS 9000 Family switching module in this highly scalable system.

Figure 1. Cisco MDS 9513 Multilayer Director

Features and Benefits

The Cisco MDS 9513 offers the following main features:

• Industry-leading scalability and availability: The Cisco MDS 9513 combines nondisruptive software upgrades, stateful process restart and failover, and full redundancy of all major components for best-in-class availability. Supporting up to 528 Fibre Channel ports in a single chassis, 1584 Fibre Channel ports in a single rack, and 2.2 Tbps of system bandwidth, the Cisco MDS 9513 leads the industry in scalability and is designed to meet the requirements of the largest data center storage environments.

• 1/2/4/8-Gbps and 10-Gbps Fibre Channel switching: The Cisco MDS 9513 supports new 8-Gbps as well as existing 10-Gbps, 4-Gbps, and 2-Gbps Cisco MDS 9000 Family Fibre Channel switching modules.

• Flexibility and investment protection: The Cisco MDS 9513 supports mix of first-, second-, and third-generation Cisco MDS 9000 Family switching modules, providing backward compatibility and unparalleled investment protection.

• TCO driven design: Offers advanced management tools for overall lowest TCO. It supports Cisco virtual SAN (VSAN) technology for hardware-enforced, isolated environments within a single physical fabric for secure sharing of physical infrastructure, further decreasing TCO.

• Multiprotocol architecture: The multilayer architecture of the Cisco MDS 9000 Family enables a consistent feature set over a protocol-independent switch fabric. The Cisco MDS 9513 transparently integrates Fibre Channel, IBM Fiber Connection (FICON), Small Computer System Interface over IP (iSCSI), and Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) in one system.

• Intelligent network services: Provides integrated support for VSAN technology, access control lists (ACLs) for hardware-based intelligent frame processing, and advanced traffic management features such as Fibre Channel Congestion Control (FCC) and fabric-wide quality of service (QoS) to enable migration from SAN islands to enterprise-wide storage networks.

• Integrated Cisco Storage Media Encryption (SME) as distributed fabric service: Supported on the Cisco MDS 18/4-port Multiservice Module, encrypts data at rest on heterogeneous tape drives and virtual tape libraries (VTLs) in a SAN environment using secure IEEE standard Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit algorithms. Cisco MDS 9000 18/4-Port Multiservice Module helps ensure ease of deployment, scalability, and high availability by using innovative technology to transparently offer Cisco SME capabilities to any device connected to the fabric without the need for reconfiguration or rewiring. Cisco SME provisioning is integrated into the Cisco Fabric Manager; no additional software is required. Cisco SME key management can be provided by either the Cisco Key Management Center (KMC) or with RSA Key Manager for the Datacenter from RSA, the security division of EMC.

• Open platform for intelligent storage applications: Provides the intelligent services necessary for hosting and/or accelerating storage applications such as network-hosted volume management, data migration and backup.

• Integrated hardware-based VSANs and Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR): Enables deployment of large-scale multisite and heterogeneous SAN topologies. Integration into port-level hardware allows any port within a system or fabric to be partitioned into any VSAN. Integrated hardware-based inter-VSAN routing provides line-rate routing between any ports within a system or fabric without the need for external routing appliances.

• Advanced FICON services: Supports 1/2/4-Gbps and 10-Gbps FICON environments, including cascaded FICON fabrics, VSAN-enabled intermix of mainframe and open systems environments, and N_Port ID virtualization for mainframe Linux partitions. CUP (Control Unit Port) support enables in-band management of Cisco MDS 9000 Family switches from the mainframe management console.

• Comprehensive security framework: Supports RADIUS and TACACS+, Fibre Channel Security Protocol (FC-SP), Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol, and Simple Network Management Protocol Version 3 (SNMPv3) implementing Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), VSANs, hardware-enforced zoning, ACLs, and per-VSAN role-based access control.

• Sophisticated diagnostics: Provides intelligent diagnostics, protocol decoding, network analysis tools as well as integrated call-home capability for added reliability, faster problem resolution, and reduced service costs.

• Unified SAN management: The Cisco MDS 9000 Family includes built-in storage network management with all features available through a command-line interface (CLI) or Cisco Fabric Manager, a centralized management tool that simplifies management of multiple switches and fabrics. Integration with third party storage management platforms allows seamless interaction with existing management tools.

• Cisco TrustSec Fibre Channel Link Encryption: Delivers transparent, hardware-based, line-rate encryption of Fibre Channel data between any Cisco MDS 9000 Family 8-Gbps modules.