Cisco MDS 9000 Intelligent Fabric Applications

Intelligent Fabric Applications is an all-encompassing term referring to centralized storage features that take into consideration the value of data over time, how quickly and at what cost certain data must be made available for end-user requests, and how long data must be retained before being deleted.

Intelligent Fabric Applications advocate a tiered approach to storage, with data being assigned to storage based on retention requirements, access rules and business policies. The intelligent features that make up this approach to storage networking specifically address key customer pain points related to storage provisioning, data migration and replication, backup and recovery, storage utilization, and increasing storage costs.

With explosive data growth and the pressure to control IT budgets, customers have an urgent need to reduce the cost and complexity of managing SAN-based storage. Cisco meets this critical customer requirement in its MDS SAN switch family with new, industry-standards-based hardware and software for moving Intelligent Fabric Applications into the network. The Cisco MDS 9000 Storage Services Module (SSM) is a line card that fits into any modular MDS 9000 chassis and enables network-hosted storage applications, network-assisted storage applications, and network-accelerated storage applications.

The SSM in conjunction with SAN-OS 2.1 or later provides support for FAIS-based storage applications, appliance-based storage applications via the SANTap protocol, and network-accelerated serverless backup. By providing an open, standards-based platform, SAN-OS-3.2 enables Intelligent Fabric Applications such as volume management, point-in-time copy, data replication, at-rest data encryption (Storage Media Encryption), continuous data protection, data migration (Data Mobility Manager), and high-performance backups.

Cisco’s commitment to standards will foster industry-wide interoperability to provide customers more flexibility in choosing the best solution for their business/IT requirements while driving down the total costs associated with managing their data. Cisco is partnering with multiple partners, including EMC, IBM, and Veritas for network-hosted virtualization. Additionally, via the SANTap protocol for appliance-based storage applications Cisco is partnering with companies such as Alacritus, Cloverleaf, FalconStor, Kaysha, Topio and Xiotech.