Cisco MDS 9124V - Switch - managed - 24 x 64Gb Fibre Channel SFP+ - front to back airflow - rack-mountable - with 24x 32 Gbps SW SFP+ transceiver
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High performance
MDS 9124V architecture, with nonblocking arbitration, provides consistent 64-Gbps low-latency performance across all traffic conditions for every Fiber Channel port on the switch.
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Fully integrated SAN analytics
This feature-rich switch also offers state-of-the-art data traffic analytics and telemetry capabilities that have been built into this next-generation hardware platform. This state-of-the-art technology couples the next-generation port ASIC with a fully dedicated Network Processing Unit (NPU). Information is extracted by the port ASIC from passing line rate traffic and used by the NPU to calculate performance data on board the switch in real time. Using an open telemetry format, the data can be streamed to any analytics visualization platform.
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Cisco Dynamic Ingress Rate Limiting (DIRL)
MDS 9124V supports the dynamic ingress rate limiting feature. Using DIRL, the MDS SAN can automatically detect any symptoms of congestion and then dynamically rate limits the congested and slow-drain devices so that adverse effects are not spread to other devices. DIRL dynamically adapts the rate-limiting to suit the traffic profile of the congestion or slow-drain device.
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Capital Expenditures (CapEx) savings
The 64-Gbps ports allow users to deploy them with existing 32- or 16-Gbps transceivers providing investment protection, with an option to upgrade to 64-Gbps transceivers and adapters whenever needed.
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High availability
MDS 9124V switch is designed to provide 99.999% availability. The MDS 9124V switches provides such outstanding availability and reliability by providing redundancy on all major components, such as the power supply and cooling subsystems. Dual power supplies also facilitate redundant power grids.
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Reliability
As part of the standard 64-Gbps Fiber Channel specification, Cisco provides FEC between switch ports and HBA ports on all 64-Gbps Fiber Channel fixed switches. This feature helps ensure any error introduced in flight gets corrected at the receive side of the link. In addition, Cisco extends Buffer-to-Buffer State Change Notification (BBSCN) and buffer-to-buffer credit recovery, which is supported on all Cisco switches between ISL ports, to the fabric ports attached to any end device. Over time, the corruption of receiver-ready messages, known as R RDY primitives, can lead to a loss of credits, which can eventually cause a link to stop transmitting in one direction. Buffer-to-buffer credit recovery provides for two attached ports to detect and correct this situation.
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Next-generation ASIC
The MDS 9124V Fiber Channel switch is powered by Cisco developed next- generation high-performance 64G ASIC.
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Higher scalability
Increased fabric scalability provides more flexibility for a variety of SAN architectures.
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Telemetry
Fiber Channel and Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) or NVMe headers can be inspected without the need for any external taps or appliances. The resulting metrics can be analyzed on the switch and can additionally be exported using a dedicated 1Gbps Small Form-Factor Pluggable Plus (SFP+) port for telemetry and analytics purposes.
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Sophisticated diagnostics
The MDS 9124V provides intelligent diagnostics tools such as ISL diagnostics, HBA diagnostics, remote SFP-error collection, Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN), integrated Cisco Call Home capability, Slow Drain Monitoring and an Online Health Management System for greater reliability, faster problem resolution, and reduced service costs.
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Virtual-machine awareness
The MDS 9124V provides visibility into all virtual machines that are accessing storage LUNs or namespaces in the fabric. This feature is available through HBAs capable of priority tagging the Virtual Machine Identifier (VMID) on every Fiber Channel frame. Virtual-machine awareness can be extended to intelligent fabric services such as analytics to visualize performance of every flow originating from each virtual machine in the fabric.
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Programmable fabric
The MDS 9124V provides Cisco NX-API, a powerful RPC-style HTTP/HTTPS API to enable flexible and rapid programming of utilities for the SAN. This can be coupled with specific modules for Ansible and Python.
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Secure-boot and anti-counterfeiting technology
The MDS 9124V uses onboard hardware that protects the entire system from malicious attacks by securing access to critical components such as the bootloader, system image loader, and Joint Test Action Group (JTAG) interface.
The next-generation Cisco MDS 9124V 64-Gbps 24-Port Fiber Channel Switch provides high-speed Fiber Channel connectivity for all-flash arrays and high-performance hosts. This switch offers state-of-the-art analytics and telemetry capabilities built into its next-generation Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chipset. This switch allows seamless transition to Fiber Channel Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe/FC) workloads whenever available without any hardware upgrade in the SAN. It empowers small, midsize, and large enterprises that are rapidly deploying cloud-scale applications using extremely dense virtualized servers, providing the benefits of greater bandwidth, scale, and consolidation. Some of the main benefits for a small-scale Storage Area Network (SAN) are automatic zoning, nonblocking forwarding and a single port group of 24 ports. Benefits for a mid- to large-size SAN include higher scale for Fiber Channel control-plane functions, Virtual SANs, fabric login (FLOGI), device alias and name server scale, 24 ports of 64-Gbps non-oversubscribed line-rate ports, bidirectional airflow, and a fixed-form NVMe/FC-ready SAN switch with enhanced Buffer-to-Buffer (B2B) credits and capable of hardware-assisted Fiber Channel link encryption. Large-scale SAN architectures built with SAN core directors can expand 64-Gbps connectivity to the server rack using these switches configured in either switch mode or Network Port Virtualization (NPV) mode. Additionally, the switch supports enhanced diagnostic features such as Inter-Switch Link (ISL) and Host-Bus-Adapter (HBA) diagnostics, remote SFP (Read Diagnostic Parameter) diagnostics, remote port beaconing (Link Cable Beaconing) and advanced reliability features such as link level Forward Error Correction (FEC) with HBA ports.
- High performance
- Fully integrated SAN analytics
- Cisco Dynamic Ingress Rate Limiting (DIRL)
- Capital Expenditures (CapEx) savings
- High availability
- Next-generation ASIC
- Higher scalability
- Sophisticated diagnostics
- Virtual-machine awareness
- Programmable fabric
- Secure-boot and anti-counterfeiting technology
