Cisco's mission to redefine storage starts with new 32Gbps storage switch

In the midst of the Cisco Partner Summit currently taking place in Dallas, Texas, the company has announced a number of new addition to its storage networking portfolio.

The annoucement unveiled a new fibre channel switch, SAN telementry streaming on Cisco MDS 9700 32G module, Virtual Instruments Technology integration for the data center, and fibre channel N-port virtualization on the Cisco Nexus 9300-FX DC switch.

Here's what you need to know about Cisco's latest offerings.

In the announcement, Cisco introduced the MDS 9132T Fibre Channel Switch.

With semi-modular design, customers can scale from 8 to 16 ports initially on the base, with further expansion to 32 ports using the 16-port expansion module.

It supports flash memory environments (flash arrays for FCP workloads now and FC-NVMe in the near future), offering built-in telemetry diagnostics to proactively identify and correct conditions that affect all-flash array performance.

The switch features 32 auto-sensing line-rate 32-Gbps Fibre Channel ports in a compact 1-rack-unit (1RU) form factor, B2B credits per port (8270) for long distance 32G FC connectivity and field-swappable port expansion modules.

Cisco SAN Telemetry Streaming provides telemetry and diagnostics data, which are crucial for troubleshooting and providing deep insight into SAN fabrics.

The Cisco MDS 9700 32G Module offers built-in sensors to provide pervasive data plane visibility for troubleshooting, infrastructure capacity planning, and optimization of SAN fabrics.

According to Cisco, data is streamed in real time using open source universal RPC framework.

The 32GB line card with built-in telemetry can be placed anywhere in the I/O path for and streamed data can be sent to any analytics application.

"Cisco now provides unmatched storage networking telemetry and performance options while also preserving customer technology investments," claims Thomas Scheibe, senior director of product management, Cisco Data Center Solutions.

Cisco now offers direct technology integration with Virtual Instruments (VI), designed for hig performance industries such as enterprise, finance and large scale service providers.

VI's VirtualWisdom application monitors and analyzes the performance and utilization of FC SAN infrastructure.

Data is streamed in real-time from the Cisco MDS 9700 32G Module to the VirtualWisdom Platform Appliance.

"Both Cisco and Virtual Instruments play important roles in the performance, reliability and scalability of the Plex Manufacturing Cloud, so the integration of Cisco SAN Telemetry Streaming with the VirtualWisdom performance management platform has huge value for PLEX," explains Joe Hollewa, senior manager of Cloud Operations at PLEX.

Based on Cisco Cloud Scale technology, the Cisco Nexus 9300-FX platforms are the next generation of fixed Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches.

With a commitment to Cisco Nexus customers who choose to consolidate their LAN and SAN infrastructure at the data center access layer, Cisco provides an easy migration path from the earlier generation of Cisco Nexus 5000, Cisco Nexus 5600, and Cisco Nexus 6000 to the latest generation of Cisco Nexus 9300-FX switches.

"With greater streaming telemetry options on a variety of platforms, a cost effective and flexible SAN switch with built-in telemetry for flash memory, and SAN Fibre Channel support for Cisco Nexus data center switches, customers can elevate corporate storage environments with a full complement of SAN technologies at their disposal.