Cisco MDS 9500 Continues to Innovate
As Doug mentioned in his recent blog:
http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/2008/03/fcoe_fibrechannel_ethernet_eag.html
the MDS platform is here to stay. There have been a lot of announcements from Cisco recently on Nexus, FCoE, and Data Center Ethernet and that’s certainly important news. However, the MDS quietly continues to innovate in the Fibre Channel market while maintaining a leadership position in Director market share (Dell’Oro CQ407).
According to Gartner, there is over $50B in installed base of Fibre Channel switching and storage equipment and it is unlikely to be obsoleted anytime soon.
FCoE offers a very important value proposition to consolidating I/O on servers that tradionally have several different interfaces and cables. To be sure, most of the complexity of running two parallel networks is at the server access layer where 80% of the ports typically exist and where there is the most concentration of cables.
However, storage arrays, tape drives, VTLs, FICON, and other Fibre Channel assets will continue to use standard Fibre Channel attachments and will likely require upgrades to 8G soon.
The MDS 9500 Director, announced in 2002, with support for 1/2/4G Fibre Channel will deliver on this requirement by delivering 8G interfaces without requiring a forklift upgrade.
And as servers begin to use FCoE to attach to the Fibre Channel SAN, the MDS 9500 will also offer FCoE line cards to ensure there is interoperability between both environments.
Investment protection is the ulitimate form of innovation.
Posted by Deepak Munjal at 01:11PM PST
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