Cisco MDS 9706 Multilayer Director - Switch - rack-mountable
- Lower TCO with SAN consolidation
- Scalable expansion with outstanding investment protection
- Enterprise-class availability
- Convergence with Multihop FCoE
- Comprehensive solution for robust security
The Cisco MDS 9706 Multilayer Director is a director-class SAN switch designed for deployment in small to medium-sized storage networks that can support enterprise clouds and business transformation. It layers a comprehensive set of intelligent features onto a high-performance, protocol-independent switch fabric. Cisco MDS 9706 addresses the stringent requirements of large virtualized data center storage environments. It delivers uncompromising availability, security, scalability, ease of management, and transparent integration of superior technologies for extremely flexible data center SAN solutions. The Cisco MDS 9706 lets you transparently deploy unified fabrics with Fiber Channel, IBM Fiber Connection (FICON), and Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connectivity for low total cost of ownership (TCO).
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Lower TCO with SAN consolidation
Organizations need efficient, cost-effective SANs to keep up with today's exponential data growth. The Cisco MDS 9706 lets you easily consolidate data assets into fewer, larger, and more manageable SANs to reduce hardware footprint and associated capital and operational expenses. It offers incredible scalability with too.
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Scalable expansion with outstanding investment protection
The Cisco MDS 9706 is designed to make optimal use of valuable data center floor space. It allows up to four Cisco MDS 9706 Directors per standard 7-foot rack. A smaller footprint makes it an excellent candidate for deployment in smaller storage networks as well as pod-based converged data center infrastructure solutions for the cloud.
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Enterprise-class availability
The Cisco MDS 9706 is designed from the beginning for high availability. In addition to meeting the basic requirements of non-disruptive software upgrades and redundancy of all critical hardware components, the Cisco MDS 9706 software architecture offers outstanding availability. The Cisco MDS 9706 provides redundancy on all major hardware components including the supervisor and fabric modules as well as the power supplies. The Cisco MDS 9700 Series Supervisor Module automatically restarts failed processes, making the Cisco MDS 9706 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.
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Convergence with Multihop FCoE
FCoE allows an evolutionary approach to network and I/O convergence by preserving all Fiber Channel constructs, maintaining the latency, security, and traffic management attributes of Fiber Channel and preserving investments in Fiber Channel tools, training, and SANs. The Cisco MDS 9706 enables transparent coexistence in a unified fabric with any-to-any connectivity for Fiber Channel and FCoE.
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Comprehensive solution for robust security
The Cisco MDS 9706 offers an extensive security framework to protect highly sensitive data crossing today's enterprise storage networks. It employs intelligent packet inspection at the port level, including the application of ACLs for hardware enforcement of zones, VSANs, and advanced port-security features. It also uses FC-SP and Cisco TrustSec Fiber Channel link encryption mechanisms to provide comprehensive security for storage networks.
