The Cisco® MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module delivers the latest advanced switching technology with proven Cisco NX-OS Software to power a new generation of scalable and intelligent multilayer switching solutions for SANs.
Designed to integrate multiprotocol switching and routing, intelligent SAN services, and storage applications onto highly scalable SAN switching platforms, the Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module enables intelligent, resilient, scalable, and secure high-performance multilayer SAN switching solutions. The Cisco MDS 9000 Family lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) for storage networking by combining robust and flexible hardware architecture, multiple layers of network and storage intelligence, and compatibility with all Cisco MDS 9000 Family switching modules.
This powerful combination helps organizations build highly available, scalable storage networks with comprehensive security and unified management. The Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module is supported in the Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director. Figure 1 shows the Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module.
Figure 1. Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module
Main Features and Benefits
The Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module offers numerous benefits.
Industry-Leading Scalability
The Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module combines industry-leading scalability and performance, intelligent SAN services, nondisruptive software upgrades, stateful process restart and failover, and fully redundant operation for a new standard in director-class SAN switching. Supporting up to 384 Fibre Channel ports in a single chassis, 1152 Fibre Channel ports in a single rack, and 24 Tbps of front-panel Fibre Channel system bandwidth, the Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module is designed to meet the requirements of even the largest data center storage environments.
Integrated Performance
The combination of the Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 module, Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module and the Fabric-1 crossbar switching modules enables up to 1.5 Tbps of Fibre Channel throughput between modules in each direction for each of the eight Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director payload slots. This per-slot bandwidth is twice the bandwidth needed to support a 48-port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel module at full line rate. The Cisco MDS 9700 architecture, based on central arbitration and crossbar fabric, provides 16-Gbps line-rate, nonblocking, predictable performance across all traffic conditions for every port in the chassis.
High Availability
The Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module and Cisco MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Directors were designed from the beginning for high availability. In addition to meeting the basic requirement of nondisruptive software upgrades, the Cisco MDS 9700 Series software architecture offers availability. The Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module has the unique ability to automatically restart failed processes, making it exceptionally robust. In the rare event that a supervisor module is reset, complete synchronization between the active and standby supervisor modules helps ensure stateful failover with no disruption of traffic.
The Cisco MDS 9700 provides the industry's first redundency on all major hardware components, as detailed in Table 1.
Table 1. Redundancy Details for Cisco MDS 9700
Component
Redundancy
Supervisors
1+1
Power supplies
Grid redundancy
Fabrics
N+1 redundancy
The Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module also provides Fabric Shortest Path First (FSPF)-based multipathing to help ensure high availability at the fabric level. With the intelligence to load balance across up to 16 equal-cost paths, the module can dynamically reroute traffic in the event of a switch failure. The Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module in combination with Cisco MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Directors provides exceptional high availability, helping ensure that solutions exceed the 99.999 percent uptime requirements of today's most demanding environments.
Lower Total Cost of Ownership
The Cisco MDS 9000 Family provides advanced management tools for overall low total cost of ownership (TCO). It supports Cisco virtual SAN (VSAN) technology for hardware-enforced, isolated environments within a single physical fabric for secure sharing of physical infrastructure, further decreasing TCO.
Comprehensive Security Framework
The Cisco MDS 9000 Family supports RADIUS and TACACS+, Fibre Channel Security Protocol (FC-SP)1, Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol, and Simple Network Management Protocol Version 3 (SNMPv3) implementing Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), VSANs, hardware-enforced zoning, access control lists (ACLs), and per-VSAN role-based access control (RBAC).
Unified SAN Management
The Cisco MDS 9000 Family includes built-in storage network management, with all features available through a command-line interface (CLI) or Cisco Prime Data Center Network Manager (DCNM), a centralized management tool that simplifies management of multiple switches and fabrics. Integration with third-party storage management platforms allows transparent interaction with existing management tools.
Intelligent Network Services
VSAN technology, ACLs for hardware-based intelligent frame processing, and fabricwide quality of service (QoS) enable migration from SAN islands to enterprisewide storage networks.
• Integrated hardware-based VSANs and Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR): Integration of VSANs into port-level hardware allows any port in a system or fabric to be partitioned to any VSAN. Integrated hardware-based IVR provides line-rate routing between any ports in a system or fabric without the need for external routing appliances.
• Intelligent storage services: The Cisco MDS 9700 operates with intelligent service capabilities on other Cisco MDS 9000 Family platforms to provide services such as acceleration of storage applications for data replication and backup and data migration to hosts and targets attached to the Cisco MDS 9700.
• Smart Zoning: When the Smart Zoning feature is enabled, Cisco MDS 9700 Series fabrics provision the hardware access control entries specified by the zone set more efficiently, avoiding the superfluous entries that would allow servers (initiators) to talk to other servers or allow storage devices (targets) to talk to other storage devices. This feature makes larger zones with multiple initiators and multiple targets feasible without excessive consumption of hardware resources. Thus, smart zones can correspond to applications, application clusters, hypervisor clusters, or other data center entities, saving the time that administrators previously spent creating many small zones and enabling the automation of zoning tasks.
Advanced Diagnostics and Troubleshooting Tools
Management of large-scale storage networks requires proactive diagnostics, tools to verify connectivity and route latency, and mechanisms for capturing and analyzing traffic. The Cisco MDS 9000 Family integrates advanced, industry-leading analysis and debugging tools. The power-on self-test (POST) and online diagnostics provide proactive health monitoring. The Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module provides the integrated functions required to implement diagnostic capabilities such as Fibre Channel traceroute for identifying the exact path and timing of flows, and Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) and Remote SPAN (RSPAN) to intelligently capture network traffic. After traffic has been captured, it can then be analyzed with the Cisco Fabric Analyzer, an embedded Fibre Channel analyzer. The Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module allows collection and management of comprehensive port-based and flow-based statistics, enabling sophisticated performance analysis and service-level agreement (SLA) accounting. The integrated Cisco Call Home capability provides additional reliability and enables faster problem resolution and reduced service costs. Starting with Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS 6.2, the powerful Cisco Generic Online Diagnostics (GOLD) framework replaces the Cisco Online Health Management System (OHMS) diagnostic framework on the new Cisco MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Director chassis. Cisco GOLD is a suite of diagnostic facilities to verify that hardware and internal data paths are operating as designed. Boot-time diagnostics, continuous monitoring, standby fabric loopback tests, and on-demand and scheduled tests are part of the Cisco GOLD feature set. This industry-leading diagnostics subsystem enables the rapid fault isolation and continuous system monitoring critical in today's continuously operating environments. With the Cisco MDS 9700 Series, Cisco delivers a comprehensive tool set for troubleshooting and analyzing an organization's storage network.
Multiprotocol Intelligence
The multilayer architecture of the Cisco MDS 9700 Series enables a consistent feature set over a protocol-independent switch fabric. The Cisco MDS 9700 transparently integrates Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)1, and IBM Fibre Connection (FICON)1.
• 2/4/8-Gbps and 4/8/16-Gbps, 10-Gbps Fibre Channel and 10 Gigabit Ethernet: The Cisco MDS 9700 supports both 2/4/8/16-Gbps and 10-Gbps ports on the Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module. The Cisco MDS 9700 also supports 10 Gigabit Ethernet clocked optics carrying 10Gbps Fibre Channel traffic.
• FICON1: The Cisco MDS 9700 is mainframe ready, with full support for IBM System z FICON and Linux environments.
• Multihop FCoE1: The Cisco MDS 9700 supports Multihop FCoE, extending connectivity from FCoE and Fibre Channel fabrics to FCoE and Fibre Channel storage devices.
• USB ports: Two USB 2.0 ports are provided on the front panel for simplified configuration-file uploading and downloading using common USB memory stick products.
Product Specifications
Table 2 lists the product specifications for the Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor-1 Module.
Table 2. Product Specifications
Feature
Description
Product Compatibility
Cisco MDS 9700 Series
Software Compatibility
Cisco MDS SAN-OS Software Release 6.2.1 or later
Interfaces
• One RS-232 RJ-45 console port
• One 10/100/1000 Ethernet management port
• Two USB 2.0 ports
Indicators
• Supervisor ID LED
• Supervisor status LED
• System status LED
• Active supervisor LED
• Power management LED
• 10/100/1000 Management Port Activity LED
• Log Flash Activity LED
• Slot 0 Activity LED
Switching Bandwidth
• Up to 24 terabits per second (Tbps) of front-panel Fibre Channel system bandwidth
• Up to 384 2/4/8-Gbps, 4/8/16-Gbps or 10-Gbps Full Line Rate autosensing Fibre Channel ports in a single chassis
