DS-C9124V-8IK9 Cisco MDS 9124V 64-Gbps 24-Port Fibre Channel Switch

Cisco MDS 9124V 64-Gbps 24-Port Fibre Channel switch brings the latest high-performance, low-latency Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) technology to market. Along with the higher bandwidth, the Cisco MDS 9124V switch supports ease of configuration and management, detailed and in-depth performance insights, and automation capabilities.

Figure 1.             

Cisco 9124V 64-Gbps 24 Port Fibre Channel Switch

Product overview

The next-generation Cisco MDS 9124V 64-Gbps 24-Port Fibre Channel Switch (Figure 1) provides high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity for all-flash arrays and high-performance hosts. This switch offers state-of-the-art analytics and telemetry capabilities built into its next-generation Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chipset. This switch allows seamless transition to Fibre Channel Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe/FC) workloads whenever available without any hardware upgrade in the SAN. It empowers small, midsize, and large enterprises that are rapidly deploying cloud-scale applications using extremely dense virtualized servers, providing the benefits of greater bandwidth, scale, and consolidation. Some of the main benefits for a small-scale Storage Area Network (SAN) are automatic zoning, nonblocking forwarding and a single port group of 24 ports. Benefits for a mid- to large-size SAN include higher scale for Fibre Channel control-plane functions, Virtual SANs, fabric login (FLOGI), device alias and name server scale, 24 ports of 64-Gbps non-oversubscribed line-rate ports, bidirectional airflow, and a fixed-form NVMe/FC-ready SAN switch with enhanced Buffer-to-Buffer (B2B) credits and capable of hardware-assisted Fibre Channel link encryption. Large-scale SAN architectures built with SAN core directors can expand 64-Gbps connectivity to the server rack using these switches configured in either switch mode or Network Port Virtualization (NPV) mode. Additionally, the switch supports enhanced diagnostic features such as Inter-Switch Link (ISL) and Host-Bus-Adapter (HBA) diagnostics, remote SFP (Read Diagnostic Parameter) diagnostics, remote port beaconing (Link Cable Beaconing) and advanced reliability features such as link level Forward Error Correction (FEC) with HBA ports.

Main features and benefits

The main features of the Cisco MDS 9124V 64-Gbps 24-Port Fibre Channel Switch include:

●     High performance: MDS 9124V architecture, with nonblocking arbitration, provides consistent 64-Gbps low-latency performance across all traffic conditions for every Fibre Channel port on the switch.

●     Fully integrated SAN Analytics: This feature-rich switch also offers state-of-the-art data traffic analytics and telemetry capabilities that have been built into this next-generation hardware platform. This new state-of-the-art technology couples the next-generation port ASIC with a fully dedicated Network Processing Unit (NPU). Information is extracted by the port ASIC from passing line rate traffic and used by the NPU to calculate performance data on board the switch in real time. Using an industry-leading open telemetry format, the data can be streamed to any analytics visualization platform.

●     Cisco Dynamic Ingress Rate Limiting (DIRL): MDS 9124V supports the dynamic ingress rate limiting feature. Using DIRL, the MDS SAN can automatically detect any symptoms of congestion and then dynamically rate limits the congested and slow-drain devices so that adverse effects are not spread to other devices. DIRL dynamically adapts the rate-limiting to suit the traffic profile of the congestion or slow-drain device.

●     Capital Expenditures (CapEx) savings: The 64-Gbps ports allow users to deploy them with existing 32- or 16-Gbps transceivers providing investment protection, with an option to upgrade to 64-Gbps transceivers and adapters whenever needed.

●     High availability: MDS 9124V switch is designed to provide 99.999% availability. The MDS 9124V switches provides such outstanding availability and reliability by providing redundancy on all major components, such as the power supply and cooling subsystems. Dual power supplies also facilitate redundant power grids.

●     Reliability: As part of the standard 64-Gbps Fibre Channel specification, Cisco provides FEC between switch ports and HBA ports on all 64-Gbps Fibre Channel fixed switches. This feature helps ensure any error introduced in flight gets corrected at the receive side of the link. In addition, Cisco extends Buffer-to-Buffer State Change Notification (BBSCN) and buffer-to-buffer credit recovery, which is supported on all Cisco switches between ISL ports, to the fabric ports attached to any end device. Over time, the corruption of receiver-ready messages, known as R_RDY primitives, can lead to a loss of credits, which can eventually cause a link to stop transmitting in one direction. Buffer-to-buffer credit recovery provides for two attached ports to detect and correct this situation.

●     Next-generation ASIC: The MDS 9124V Fibre Channel switch is powered by Cisco developed next- generation high-performance 64G ASIC.

●     Higher scalability: Increased fabric scalability provides more flexibility for a variety of SAN architectures.

●     Telemetry^[1]: Fibre Channel and Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) or NVMe headers can be inspected without the need for any external taps or appliances. The resulting metrics can be analyzed on the switch and can additionally be exported using a dedicated 1Gbps Small Form-Factor Pluggable Plus (SFP+) port for telemetry and analytics purposes.

●     Intelligent services: Auto-zone, Smart Zoning, slow-drain detection and isolation, Virtual SAN (VSAN) and Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR), and fabric-wide Quality of Service (QoS) enable migration from SAN islands to enterprise-wide storage networks. Traffic encryption is available to meet stringent security requirements.

●     Sophisticated diagnostics: The MDS 9124V provides intelligent diagnostics tools such as ISL diagnostics, HBA diagnostics, remote SFP-error collection, Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN), integrated Cisco Call Home capability, Slow Drain Monitoring and an Online Health Management System for greater reliability, faster problem resolution, and reduced service costs.

●     Virtual-machine awareness: The MDS 9124V provides visibility into all virtual machines that are accessing storage LUNs or namespaces in the fabric. This feature is available through HBAs capable of priority tagging the Virtual Machine Identifier (VMID) on every Fibre Channel frame. Virtual-machine awareness can be extended to intelligent fabric services such as analytics to visualize performance of every flow originating from each virtual machine in the fabric.

●     Programmable fabric: The MDS 9124V provides Cisco NX-API, a powerful RPC-style HTTP/HTTPS API to enable flexible and rapid programming of utilities for the SAN. This can be coupled with specific modules for Ansible and Python.

●     Secure-boot and anti-counterfeiting technology: The MDS 9124V uses onboard hardware that protects the entire system from malicious attacks by securing access to critical components such as the bootloader, system image loader, and Joint Test Action Group (JTAG) interface.

SAN architecture benefits

The new 64-Gbps fabric switches address the requirement for highly scalable, virtualized, intelligent SAN infrastructure in current-generation data center environments. The industry is already poised to transition to 64-Gbps fixed switches with the availability of 64-Gbps HBAs and storage arrays from vendors. Additionally, as low-latency flash arrays and extremely dense virtualization deployments become more pervasive, fixed switches will be expected to provide 64-Gbps connectivity to the SAN core.

This solution offers several important benefits:

●     Server port consolidation: The demand for 64-Gbps fabric switches will increase as hyperscale virtualization doubles the virtual machine density per rack, increasing the need for higher bandwidth HBA ports per rack of blade or standalone servers. Soon 64-Gbps HBA ports will consolidate the current 16-Gbps HBA installed base, with the need to increase the server capacity in the same rack. Hence, the MDS 9124V, with 24-port in a 1RU form factor, provides an excellent solution.

●     Simplification: Through consolidation, the SAN administrator can reduce complexity and simplify management. With an MDS 9124V 64-Gbps 24-Port switch in N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) core mode and Fibre Channel switches connecting to it in N_Port Virtualization (NPV) mode, device ports can scale very cost-effectively over time without adding the burden of managing the NPV switches. Auto-zoning facilitates zero-touch automatic zoning without any need for configuring zoning on the 64-Gbps fixed switches that are deployed in SANs with single switch topology.

●     Multiprotocol convergence: 64-Gbps links benefit from lower latency when compared to lower bandwidth links, bringing better network throughput to your storage array workloads. Greater bandwidth also helps ensure less ISL congestion for the newer storage protocols that are expected to be available on externally attached storage arrays: for instance, NVMe over Fibre channel can coexist on the same link as existing SCSI workloads.

●     Scale and performance: This fixed form-factor switch supports the performance and scale required to deploy a dedicated and standalone Fibre Channel SAN connecting both initiators and targets without requiring any other switching infrastructure.

VSAN

VSANs are ideal for efficient, secure SAN consolidation, enabling more efficient storage network utilization by creating hardware-based isolated environments with a single physical SAN fabric or switch. Each VSAN can be zoned as a typical SAN and maintains its own fabric services for added scalability and resilience. VSANs allow the cost of SAN infrastructure to be shared among more users, while helping ensure complete segregation of traffic and retaining independent control of configuration on a VSAN-by-VSAN basis.

IVR

In another step toward deploying efficient, cost effective, consolidated storage networks, the Cisco MDS 9124V supports IVR, the industry’s first routing function for Fibre Channel. IVR allows selective transfer of data between initiators and targets on different VSANs while maintaining isolation of control plane traffic within each VSAN. With IVR, data can transit VSAN boundaries while maintaining control plane isolation, thereby maintaining fabric stability and availability. IVR is one of the feature enhancements requiring a license and eliminates the need for external routing appliances, greatly increasing routing scalability while delivering line rate routing performance, simplifying management, and eliminating the challenges associated with maintaining separate systems. Under the right circumstances, deploying IVR means lower total cost of SAN ownership.

Comprehensive solution for Robust Network Security

To address the need for enhanced security in storage networks, the Cisco MDS 9124V includes as standard an extensive security framework to protect highly sensitive data crossing today’s enterprise networks:

●     Smart Zoning: When the Smart Zoning feature is enabled, Cisco MDS 9000 Family fabrics provision the hardware access control entries specified by the zone set more efficiently, avoiding the superfluous entries that would allow servers (initiators) to communicate to other servers, or allow storage devices (targets) to communicate to other storage devices. This feature makes larger zones with multiple initiators and multiple targets feasible without excessive consumption of hardware resources. Thus, smart zones can correspond to applications, application clusters, hypervisor clusters, or other data center entities, saving the time that administrators previously spent creating many small zones, and enabling the automation of zoning tasks.

●     Intelligent packet inspection is provided at the port level, including the application of ACLs for hardware enforcement of zones, VSANs, and advanced port security features.

●     Switch-to-switch and host-to-switch authentication helps eliminate disruptions that may occur because of unauthorized devices connecting to a large enterprise fabric.

●     FC-SP ESP payload encryption, which supports encrypted data to flow through the switch, is supported.

●     Port security locks down the mapping of an entity to a switch port to help ensure that SAN security is not compromised by the connection of unauthorized devices to a switch port.

●     VSAN-based access control allows customers to define roles in which the scope of the roles is limited to certain VSANs.

●     FC-SP provides switch-switch and host-switch Diffie-Hellman Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (DH-CHAP) authentication, supporting RADIUS and TACACS+, to help ensure that only authorized devices access protected storage networks.

●     Digital certificates are issued by a trusted third party and are used as electronic passports to prove the identity of certificate owners.

Ease of management

To meet the needs of all users, the Cisco MDS 9124V provides three principal modes of management: the Cisco MDS 9000 Family CLI and integration with third-party storage management tools.

The Cisco MDS 9124V presents a consistent, logical CLI. Adhering to the syntax of the widely known Cisco NX-OS^® Software CLI, the Cisco MDS 9000 Family CLI is easy to learn and delivers broad management capabilities. The Cisco MDS 9000 Family CLI is an extremely efficient and direct interface designed to provide optimal capabilities to administrators in enterprise environments.

Cisco MDS Smart Licensing

The Cisco MDS 9124V supports the Cisco Smart Licensing Using Policy (SLP) licensing model. With this licensing model, it is easier to buy, use, and manage Cisco MDS software and port expansion licenses for MDS 9124V. The licenses are in digital form and, once ordered on Cisco Commerce, are credited instantly to the customer’s Cisco Smart Account or partner holding account. The software licenses are not tied to a serial number, so a customer can allocate the software licenses on different switches of the same model as required. Through the Cisco Smart Account on Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM), a customer can easily manage all its Cisco licenses from one single place.

Cisco MDS 9124V implements a simplified licensing model with two subscription software licenses – Premier and Advantage – available with 1-, 3-, 5-, and 7-year options for direct sale and for sale to OSM partners. The Premier subscription license includes Enterprise, NDFC and SAN Analytics licenses, and the Advantage subscription license incudes Enterprise and NDFC licenses. Customers can buy the subscription licenses as required, so they pay as they use.

Table 1.           Software subscription licenses

Product specifications

Table 2.           Product specifications