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Best storage switches winner: Cisco MDS 9509
By Christine Burns and Keith Shaw
Network World Best of the Tests, 02/28/05
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.
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