This week Cisco introduced two new 32G Fibre Channel switches and management software designed, to its storage family that will help customers manage and troubleshoot their SANS. According to Cisco’s research, by the year 2020, the amount of data stored inside data centers is estimated to grow by a factor of five, from 400 exabytes to almost 2 zettabytes. The data-center storage installed capacity will grow up to 1.8 ZB, from 382 EB in 2015, nearly a five-fold growth by the year 2020.
Cisco said, “The idea is to eliminate the cycles spent in provisioning new devices and avert errors that typically occur when manually configuring complex zones. Even when a host or storage hardware is upgraded or a faulty facility is replaced, the switch automatically detects the change and zones them into the SAN.”
These new switches, 48-Port MDS 9148T and 96-Port MDS 9396T features a technology called Auto Zone that automatically identifies any new devices or storage servers that accesses a SAN and automatically points them to the particular port without having to do manual configuration.
From the software point of view, Cisco upgraded its MDS Diagnostics (version 11) suite to help customers isolate and fix SAN problems, like new features called HBA Diagnostics and Read Diagnostic Parameter allows MDS switches trigger tests to validate and confirm normal operations on edge-connected devices.
The new switches replaces Cisco’s existing MDS storage-fabric switch line which includes the 9132T 32 Port 32G Fibre Channel Switch and MDS 9396S 16G Multilayer Fabric Switch. The MDS family also includes the much larger 9700 Director line of switches. Also, the MDS family comprises of a huge 9700 Director line of switches.
