High Performance and scalability of Cisco MDS9000 switch (1)

Now, in this era of successful IT organizations built on powerful technical infrastructure, enterprises can improve the automation level and speed of their mission-critical applications. The enterprise's dependence on technical infrastructure will be constantly strengthened, so that the enterprise's requirements on the performance and scalability of the infrastructure will be constantly improved. This increase in requirements means that when designing application environments, including storage infrastructure, suppliers need to increasingly consider how to improve performance, scalability, and efficiency. Higher Performance Requirements enable suppliers to design and deploy faster and more scalable IT environments-from applications to storage subsystems.

In the past, it was widely accepted that the slowest link in application infrastructure was storage access. Storage Network SAN) eliminates the bottleneck in the application environment to a large extent. However, the current demand for storage networks has exceeded the performance and scalability of today's storage network product, the fiber channel switch. Scalability not only refers to the capacity for increasing network bandwidth, but also whether to use the number of ports of existing fiber channel switches to effectively build a large-scale storage network. With the increasing demand for storage networks, users urgently need a high-performance, powerful storage network platform that can meet the bandwidth and port quantity requirements by scaling. Such a platform must be able to provide investment protection, that is, it can support future needs, transmission methods and port density, and generate a return on investment in a short period of time.

The Cisco MDS 9000 series multi-layer fiber channel switch platform is a highly scalable modular switch that uses a unique design that not only surpasses the performance and density requirements of the current storage network, it also ensures compatibility and supports future performance and scalability requirements. The Cisco MDS 9000 Series can provide outstanding Investment Protection for the future and meet users' current needs.

Figure 1Cisco MDS 9500 series controller switches and 9216 fibre channel switches

Figure 1

Cisco MDS 9000 Series fibre channel switches are a new product developed by Cisco to provide outstanding performance and high port density. However, it is equally important that it can optimize the configuration of Bandwidth Resources in the storage network. The Cisco MDS 9000 Series can provide users with a lot of intelligent means through an improved architecture and related function sets to help users control the deployment and usage of bandwidth. In addition, many tools in this product can provide accurate reports on the usage of resources in the storage network. The following describes the performance and scalability of the Cisco MDS 9000 series switches and how to use these features to build a high-performance, high-density storage network and optimize network resource configuration.

Architecture that helps improve performance

The Cisco MDS 9500 series controllers use a highly scalable architecture and provide a set of intelligent functions in the Cisco ios san operating system to optimize network performance. The core hardware architecture is the foundation of this high-performance platform. The core hardware architecture is built on a unique and powerful high-performance backbone network in the industry. The hardware itself includes many improvement measures to further improve the performance of the platform to meet and surpass the current needs of users.

Figure 2Performance architecture of Cisco MDS 9500 Series

Figure 2

The Cisco MDS 9216 fibre Channel switch is not controller-level because it is only configured with a single processor, but provides an exchange path array of up to 80 Gbps bandwidth between all ports in the system, therefore, the system can run at full speed.