Cisco refreshes storage networking portfolio
Cisco has refreshed its storage networking portfolio to expand connectivity options for data centers, reduce data center cabling and reduce the data center footprint.
The networking vendor says user demands and shifting application requirements are imposing higher demands on data center, cloud and storage infrastructure, requiring a 'transformative' new approach that is simpler, more agile, high performance and cost-effective.
It says its updates are designed to support high data growth, scale and programmability for data centers, cloud and storage infrastructure.
The company's new director switch – aka 'the beast' – packs what Cisco claims is the industry's highest port density, scaling up to 768 ports of 16G fibre channel, and able to meet the requirements of large virtualised data center storage environments.
The company says the switch, the Cisco MDS 9718, is also the industry's first SAN director to support native REST API calls directly to the switch. The Director is future-proofed, coming 32G-ready, with Cisco promising a 'seamless' transition from today's 16G to 32G with a software upgrade and the addition of a 32G line card.
The company also debuted the Nexus 5672UP-16G platform which it says 'raises the bar for data center convergence', enabling 16G FC, 40G FCoE and 40G Ethernet from the same platform.
Also announced were the Nexus 2348UPQ Fabric Extender and the Unified Computing System Fabric Interconnect 6300 Series and Fabric Extender 2304.
Cisco says the UCS Fabric Interconnect 6300 Series adds to the 6200 series to deploy 40Gb, 40G, FcoE and 16Gb FC to further bandwidth capacity and provide for an adaptable data center fabric.
