Cisco DS-X9308-SMIP : Cisco MDS 9000 Family 8-port IP Storage Services Module

Companies investing in Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure have realized significant benefits in increased storage utilization and availability, simplified management, and more effective disaster recovery and business continuance strategies. Until now, however, SAN deployments have been primarily focused on mission-critical application islands within individual data centers. The difficulty and cost associated with migrating the large number of data center midrange servers to Fibre Channel have made it impractical for IT managers to extend the benefits of SAN to midrange applications. Using open-standard IP-based technology, the Cisco MDS 9000 Family IP Storage Services Modules eliminate the barriers to SAN expansion, enabling businesses to extend the reach of their Fibre Channel SANs throughout the data center and between data centers. The dual functionality of the Cisco MDS 9000 Family IP Storage Services Modules support interconnection of remote SAN islands and extends SAN connectivity to Ethernet attached servers using the FCIP and iSCSI protocols, respectively.

The Cisco IP Storage Services Modules seamlessly integrate into the Cisco MDS 9500 Series of Multilayer Directors and the MDS 9200 Series of Multilayer Fabric Switches. Traffic can be switched between any IP storage port and any Fibre Channel port on a Cisco MDS 9000 Family switch. The Cisco IP Storage Services Modules support the full range of services available on other Cisco MDS 9000 Family Fibre Channel Switching Modules including VSANs, security, and traffic management.

The Cisco 4-port IP Storage Services Module and the Cisco 8-port IP Storage Services Module support, respectively, four and eight hot-swappable, Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP), LC Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. Modules can be configured with short-wave, long-wave, or extended-reach SFPs for connectivity up to 100 kilometers. Additionally, all ports are configurable for both FCIP and iSCSI. Ports configured for FCIP operation can be further configured to support up to three virtual ISL connections.