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Cisco MDS9706 vs 9396S
I've got a need of ~70x ports to migrate from an existing MDS9509. We have a very simple configuration, one zoneset per switch, no ISL's to other san switches (not counting UCS), no extended distance. We are a Cisco UCS shop and the port count numbers we needed in have dropped off dramatically (from >250 to 70). Question I'm being asked now is: are we at a point to drop from the director class switches to the department. The 9396s does 96x ports has ISSU and multiple power supplies so why wouldn't I go with a 9396s, only thing I can really think of is it can goto 32GB ports and if in the future we need more than 96x. 10/40GB FCOE, FCIP aren't benefits to management so is there another reason to give to management why we should go with a director class MDS9706 other than it's a director class?
dynamox
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October 19th, 2017 15:00
funny you brought this up because we are at the same decision point. Our 9509 and some blades in 9513 are going EOSL so we need to make a decision of what to do next. Just like you we have had significant consolidation of the last 5 years, UCS, big VMAX AF instead of many VNX/VMAX. Given that price for a director class switch is almost x4 as expensive we will be strongly considering 9396 as our future core switches. Yes we will not be able to use 32g blades, we won't have access to the new fancy analytics functionality but it's just nearly impossible to justify that price difference. If we ever need to expand beyond 96 ports it will be PITA because you have to start dealing with ISLs etc but the way things are going we'll be expanding in the "cloud" versus building out huge datacenter FC switches.
healyj
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November 8th, 2017 06:00
Hello,
Let me do a little research and get back to you.
Thanks and rgds,
Jim.
Billy_Baroo
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November 8th, 2017 13:00
I was at the same decision point about a year ago. We had two MDS-9509s at our primary and 2 at our DR site.
You are correct about the $ on the 9710s...they are very salty. My wonderful DELL/EMC pre-sales engineer wanted to sell us 4 9710s.... but I went with 2 9710s at primary and 2 9396s at DR site.
All is working great at both sites...I have 160 of the possible 192 ports populated on a 2 SAN 9396 fabric and the CPU/memory on the 9396s are barely registering work.