Storage

Director-class multi-protocol switches, workgroup switches, disaster-recovery tools

By Christine Burns and Keith Shaw, Network World, 02/28/05

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Winner: Cisco's MDS 9509

The Cisco MDS 9509 is a repeat offender, but we mean that in the nicest of ways. For the second year running, this director-class storage switch (packed with 112 ports of 2G bit/sec Fibre Channel) has captured the top pick in this category for its combination of innovative features, strong performance and fantastic management wares.

"While we can't call it perfect, we can say it's the [director-class SAN switch] the competition has to beat," wrote Edwin Mier, a Network World Lab Alliance member. We retested the MDS 9509 in what we had expected to be a comparative test with like models from competitors Brocade and McData, but those two companies declined to participate.

The 9509 supports up to seven hot-swappable line cards that can be any mixture of 16- or 32-port, 2G bit/sec Fibre Channel Switching Modules. An eight-port Gigabit Ethernet IP Storage Module lets users directly integrate popular storage-over-IP connections with the Fibre Channel fabric. The Cisco switch delivers the survivability users expect at the core of their SAN fabric: redundant, hot-swappable management/fabric-control cards and power supplies.

The Cisco Fabric Manager GUI offers an extensive range of useful configuration capabilities. But most impressive is the copy-and-paste configuration, which lets the user select any configured switch and apply all the same settings to any other switch. The Fabric Manager also can readily push new software images onto one or a group of switches.

Update THE PRODUCT: Since testing last May, Cisco has upgraded its MDS 9509 to support hardware IPSec encryption for Fibre Channel over IP and iSCSI, hardware compression for more efficient transport of storage traffic and tape acceleration, which improves the performance of and ex­tends distances for remote backups. Cisco also has extended buffer credits to up to 3,500 per port, a development that lets the MDS 9509 extend Fibre Channel traffic natively over dark fiber or over SONET/synchronous digital hierarchy network links. Practically speaking, storage administrators now can send Fibre Channel frames up to about 2,175 miles from one data center to another using this capability. On the management front, Cisco offers its SAN Extension Tuner, which helps storage ad­ministrators fine-tune traffic when sending and receiving storage traffic over long distances. Lastly, Cisco introduced SANTap, a protocol-based interface that lets appliance-based storage applications run over highly available, high-performance MDS 9000 fabrics. THE COMPANY: Cisco introduced Storage Specialization, a training and certification program aimed to help qualified reseller partners better understand the key features and benefits of the MDS 9000 platform. Cisco also introduced a storage network-focused version of its Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert program.

Cisco also offers its proprietary storage equivalent to virtual LANs, called VSANs, which separates groups of ports into discrete "virtual fabrics." This isolates each VSAN group from the disruptive effects of fabric reconvergence that might occur in another VSAN. And, as with VLANs, routing is used to forward frames between initiator and target (SAN source and destination) pairs in different VSANs.

PRODUCT MASTERMIND

The man: Luca Cafiero, general manager of the Data Center, Switching and Wireless Technologies Group

Job duties: Cafiero led the design concept, engineering and other product development aspects since the inception of the MDS 9000 in January 2001. He is now the general manager of the technology group that manufactures and markets the MDS 9000 SAN switches.

Favorite Feature: "Virtual SANs, because it was the first feature of its kind for the storage industry. It has revolutionized how SAN administrators design, build and manage their storage networks. If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, VSANs have truly been well accepted given the number of me-too features from other vendors."

Finalists Lefthand Networks' SAN/iQ Software, NSI Software's Double-Take for Windows and XOSoft's WANSync HA Exchange all pulled in high marks in our test of disaster-recovery tools specifically geared for Microsoft Exchange networks.