Introducing the Highly Scalable MDS 9396S Switch.
At EMC World 2015, Erik Smith, Consulting Technologist on the EMC Connectrix team, hosted a Birds of a Feather session titled ‘FC: Should I Stay or Should I Go?’ Well, the standing room only crowd (>400 people), voted strongly their support for Fibre Channel as a long-term requirement. One of the key factors the audience voiced included continued investment by the FC industry. They were vocal about ensuring we keep the roadmaps fresh, invest in new platforms, and keep the products as high performance, highly available, and highly scalable as we have all trusted for more than 15 years.
Cisco, one of EMC’s strategic Connectrix partners, is meeting that need today, by announcing the Cisco MDS 9396S highly scalable switch platform. Cisco and EMC Connectrix MDS customers will have another choice for designing Fibre Channel SANs that can grow as your business grows.
The Big Deal
Our customers continue to ask for simple, easy to configure, automated FC systems. They also want choice to ensure their needs are met as their platforms and applications scale. The MDS 9396S fits well in the family portfolios as it complements the existing MDS 9148S switch and the MDS 97xx Directors. Customers have more options for how to build Enterprise Private Clouds, application specific infrastructure, and dense compute environments.
Critical to success is the ability to simplify deployment and automate configuration steps. The MDS 9396S meets those needs with the Power on Auto Provisioning (POAP) and easy to use Configuration Wizard for plug-and-play deployments.
Modernize your SAN with your Storage
The MDS series will now have even more opportunity for you to think broadly about how you design your FC SAN. Whether you deploy based on the traditional Core-Edge architecture, or build out individual racks and rows, the MDS series, can fit your design. Adding the MDS 9396S to those options provides a nice building block as it scales from 48 to 96 ports per system, so you can start modest with a couple of switches (for high availability) that can grow to hundreds of ports in only a few chassis.
This is true as you design your Fibre Channel SAN or FICON environment. The MDS 9396S will fit across a broad range of your Data Center, supporting VMAX, VNX, XtremIO and Data Domain storage platforms.
Together, Cisco and EMC will continue to enhance the storage networking experience for our joint customers. EMC expects to start shipping the MDS 9396S in calendar quarter Q3 2015.
For more information, please also check out:
- Register for a Cisco Webinar on how the “New Cisco SAN Solutions Maximize Scale, Performance, and Affordability” here