Cisco MDS License

Cisco MDS Switches

Reduce costs and increase availability

Cisco MDS 9000 multilayer SAN switches can help lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) of storage environments. They combine a robust, flexible hardware architecture with multiple layers of network and storage-management intelligence. With them, you can build highly available, scalable storage networks with advanced security and unified management.

Features and benefits

Flexibility

MDS 9000 products are adaptable, ready to accommodate future physical, virtual, and cloud environments. They have fully redundant components and fault-tolerant design.

Superior performance

MDS 9000 products provide for state-of-the-art multiprotocol and multiservice convergence. In addition, you can take advantage of a high-performance SAN extension.

Cisco MDS 9700

Product Overview

Multiprotocol storage networking is central to Cisco® Unified Fabric, providing a networking platform for IT departments to achieve lower total cost of ownership (TCO), enhanced resiliency, and greater agility. Cisco Unified Fabric unifies storage and data networking with the data center operating system to deliver convergence, scalability, and network intelligence. With the Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 10-Gbps Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) Module (Figure 1), the Cisco MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Directors platform now offers both 16-Gbps Fibre Channel and 10-Gbps FCoE capabilities, providing multiprotocol flexibility for SANs. Now you can extend the benefits of FCoE beyond the access layer to the data center core with a full line-rate FCoE module for the Cisco MDS 9700 Series.

Save money, simplify management, reduce power and cooling requirements, and improve flexibility by deploying FCoE, while protecting your Fibre Channel SAN investment with the Cisco MDS 9700 10-Gbps 48-Port FCoE Module. FCoE allows an evolutionary approach to I/O consolidation by preserving all Fibre Channel constructs. It maintains the latency, security, and traffic management attributes of Fibre Channel, as well as your investment in Fibre Channel tools, training, and SANs. FCoE also extends Fibre Channel SAN connectivity; now 100 percent of your network servers can be attached to the SAN.

Figure 1. Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 10-Gbps FCoE Module

Main Features

The main features of the Cisco MDS 9700 10-Gbps 48-Port FCoE Module include:

• High performance: Cisco MDS 9700 Series architecture, based on central arbitration and crossbar fabric, provides 10-Gbps line-rate, nonblocking, predictable performance across all traffic conditions for every FCoE port in the chassis.
• Efficient encoding: FCoE takes advantage of the more efficient encoding mechanisms of 10-Gbps Ethernet to provide 50 percent more bandwidth than 8-Gbps Fibre Channel (the actual throughput of 8-Gbps Fibre Channel is 6.8 Gbps). Therefore, you need fewer 10 Gigabit Ethernet links to achieve the same bandwidth as with multiple 8-Gbps links.
• High availability: Cisco MDS 9700 Series directors provide outstanding availability and reliability. These are the industry’s first director-class switches that offer redundancy on all major components, including the fabric card. They provide grid redundancy on the power supply and 1+1 redundant supervisors. Users can also can add fabric cards to enable N+1 fabric redundancy.
• Scalability: The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 10-Gbps FCoE Module provides up to 384 10-Gbps, full line-rate, autosensing ports in a single 9710 chassis or up to 192 10-Gbps full line-rate ports in a single Cisco MDS 9706 Multilayer Director chassis.
• Resilient high-performance Inter-Switch Links (ISLs): FCoE ISLs can be grouped into PortChannels with up to 16 physical links, creating massive 160-Gbps logical links. When you connect to Cisco Nexus® 7000 Series Switches populated with Cisco Nexus 7000 Series 10 Gigabit Ethernet modules, you can easily scale the number of director-class FCoE ports to meet the needs of the most demanding data center environments.
• Intelligent network services: VSAN technology, access control lists (ACLs) for hardware-based intelligent frame processing, and fabricwide quality of service (QoS) enable migration from SAN islands to enterprisewide storage networks.
• Sophisticated diagnostics: The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 10-Gbps FCoE Module provides intelligent diagnostics, protocol decoding, network analysis tools, and integrated Cisco Call Home capability for greater reliability, faster problem resolution, and reduced service costs.

Main Benefits

As server workloads increase, converged networks can reduce complexity and lower data center power consumption, extending the lifecycle of existing assets. Converged networks also improve SAN attachment rates to simplify virtual machine mobility.

Bring the benefits of I/O consolidation at the access layer to the data center core with the Cisco MDS 9700 10-Gbps 48-Port FCoE Module.This approach offers three important benefits:

• Investment protection: FCoE is an evolutionary technology with the same management model as Fibre Channel. With FCoE, you can preserve your investments in Fibre Channel tools, training, and SANs. The Cisco MDS 9700 FCoE module provides investment protection for existing Fibre Channel storage by transparently bridging the gap between FCoE SANs (traffic originating from server-side networks) and Fibre Channel SANs (traffic heading toward storage arrays), as shown in Figure 2.
  Figure 2. MDS 9700 Interconnects FCoE and Fibre Channel SANs
• Agility: Over time, a converged network uses network capacity more efficiently in both LAN and SAN deployments. Higher bandwidth capacity also improves responsiveness for all traffic types. The end-to-end benefits of FCoE include the capability to set up, move, and change both physical and virtual assets with greater speed and fewer points of failure.
• Simplification: Through consolidation, a converged network can reduce complexity and provide a greater return on investment (ROI).

This module also supports connectivity to FCoE initiators and targets that send only FCoE traffic, thus providing a way to deploy a dedicated FCoE SAN without requiring any convergence.

Cisco MDS 9300 Switch

Product Overview

The next-generation Cisco MDS 9396T 32-Gbps 96-Port 2-rack unit Fibre Channel Switch (Figure 1) provides high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity in the SAN. This switch offers state-of-art analytics and telemetry capability built into its next-generation Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) platform. The Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe)-ready switch allows seamless transition to Fibre Channel Non-Volatile Memory Express (FC-NVMe) workloads whenever available without any hardware upgrade in the SAN. This high-density, highly reliable and scalable, enterprise class switch is ideal for medium to large departmental SANs.

For standalone SANs, this switch can serve dense hyperscale server environments that spawn thousands of virtual Host Bus Adapters (vHBAs) serving several virtual machine instances, providing each of them with predictable throughput, consistent latency and highly available paths by distributing the physical SAN connectivity across six different port groups of 16 ports each. Autozone allows these standalone deployments to benefit from automatic zoning of host and storage ports without requiring any manual zoning configuration. These smaller port groups enable a design with smaller failure domains rather than one large failure domain consisting of all switch ports.

The number of hosts can be expanded further by connecting this switch as an N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) core switch to any existing top-of-rack switch in N-Port Virtualization (NPV) mode. Large-scale departmental SANs can deploy this switch as end-of-row, middle-of-row, or even top-of-rack in either forward or reverse airflow directions, connecting to existing MDS directors in the SAN core.

Figure 1. Cisco MDS 9396T 32-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel Switch

Main Features

The main features of the MDS 9396T 32-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel Switch include:

• High density and scale: Ninety-six 32-Gbps line rate Enhanced Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP+) ports provide an aggregate bandwidth of 3-Tbps per switch for highly scalable designs for hyperscale environments that drive several thousands of virtual machine instances within the rack. This switch provides at least 6 ports that can be configured with up to 8270 Buffer-To-Buffer (B2B) credits that can be connected to remote data centers as far as 612 km (380 miles) using native Fibre Channel connectivity at 32-Gbps speeds. These distances become even greater at lower speeds.
• Fully integrated SAN analytics: This feature-rich switch also offers state-of-the-art SAN analytics and telemetry capabilities that have been built into this-next generation hardware platform. This new state-of-the-art technology couples the next-generation port ASIC with a fully dedicated Network Processing Unit designed to complete analytics calculations in real time on the 32-Gbps line card. The telemetry data extracted from the inspection of the frame headers are calculated on board (within the switch) and, using an industry-leading open format, can be streamed to any analytics-visualization platform.
• High performance: The MDS 9396T architecture, with centralized nonblocking arbitration, provides consistent 32-Gbps low-latency performance across all traffic conditions for every Fibre Channel port on the switch.
• Capital Expenditure (CapEx) savings: The 32-Gbps ports allow users to deploy them on existing 16- or 8-Gbps transceivers, reducing initial CapEx and investment protection with an option to upgrade to 32-Gbps transceivers and adapters whenever needed.
• High availability: MDS 9396T switches continue to provide the same outstanding availability and reliability as the previous generation of Cisco MDS 9000 Series Switches by providing redundancy on all major components such as the power supply and fan. Dual power supplies also facilitate redundant power grids. Port-channel link members can be stitched across the six 16-port port groups, thus providing higher availability compared to traditional fixed switches with a single ASIC or port group.
• Grow in-small increments: The MDS 9396T Fibre Channel Switch provides an option to deploy as few as 48 32-Gbps Fibre Channel ports in the entry-level variant, and then grow in increments of 16 ports to up to 96 ports. This allows four possible configurations of 48, 64, 80, and 96 ports.
• Next-generation ASIC: The MDS 9396T Fibre Channel Switch is powered by the same high-performance 32-Gbps Cisco ASIC with an integrated network processor that powers the Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 32-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module. Among all the advanced features that this ASIC enables, one of the most notable is inspection of Fibre Channel and Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) headers from every storage workload without the need for any external taps or appliances. The recorded flows can be analyzed on the switch and also exported using a dedicated 1/10G SFP+ port for telemetry and analytics purposes.
• Intelligent network services: Slow-drain detection and isolation, Virtual SAN (VSAN) identifier, Access Control Lists (ACLs) for hardware-based intelligent frame processing, smart zoning, and fabricwide Quality of Service (QoS) enable migration from SAN islands to enterprisewide storage networks. Traffic encryption is optionally available to meet stringent security requirements.
• Sophisticated diagnostics: The MDS 9396T provides intelligent diagnostics tools such as Inter-Switch Link (ISL) diagnostics, HBA diagnostics with leading HBA vendors, read diagnostic parameters, protocol decoding, network analysis tools, and integrated Cisco Call Home capability for greater reliability, faster problem resolution, and reduced service costs.
• Virtual machine awareness: The MDS 9396T provides visibility into all virtual machines accessing the storage LUNs in the fabric. This feature is available through HBAs capable of priority tagging the Virtual Machine Identifier (VMID) on every Fibre Channel frame. Virtual-machine awareness can be extended to intelligent fabric services such as analytics1 to visualize performance of every flow originating from each virtual machine in the fabric.
• Programmable fabric: The MDS 9396T provides powerful Representational State Transfer (REST) and Cisco NX-OS Software API capabilities to enable flexible and rapid programming of utilities for the SAN.
• Single-pane management: Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM), which currently manages the entire suite of Cisco data center products, can be used to provision, manage, monitor, and troubleshoot the MDS 9396T.
• Secure-boot and anti-counterfeiting technology: The MDS 9396T 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.

Cisco MDS 9200 Switch

Product overview

The Cisco MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch (Figure 1), the next generation of the highly flexible, industry‑leading, proven Cisco MDS 9200 Series Multiservice Switches, is an optimized platform for deploying high-performance SAN extension solutions, distributed intelligent fabric services, and cost-effective multiprotocol connectivity for both open systems and mainframe environments. With a compact form factor and advanced capabilities normally available only on director-class switches, the Cisco MDS 9250i is an ideal solution for departmental and remote branch-office SANs as well as in large-scale SANs in conjunction with the Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director.

The Cisco MDS 9250i offers up to forty 16-Gbps Fibre Channel ports, two 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet IP storage services ports, and eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) ports in a fixed Two-Rack-Unit (2RU) form factor. The Cisco MDS 9250i connects to existing native Fibre Channel networks, protecting current investments in storage networks. The Cisco SAN Extension over IP application package license is enabled as standard on the two fixed 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet IP storage services ports, enabling features such as Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) and compression on the switch without the need for additional licenses. Also, using the eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet FCoE ports, the Cisco MDS 9250i platform attaches to directly connected FCoE and Fibre Channel storage devices and supports multitiered unified network fabric connectivity directly over FCoE.

Figure 1. Cisco MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch

Main features and benefits

The Cisco MDS 9250i provides unique Multiservice and multiprotocol functions in a compact 2RU form factor:

• SAN consolidation with integrated multiprotocol support: The Cisco MDS 9250i is available in a base configuration of 20 ports of 16-Gbps Fibre Channel for high-performance SAN connectivity, 2 ports of 1/10-Gigabit Ethernet for FCIP and Small Computer System Interface over IP (iSCSI) storage services, and 8 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet for FCoE connectivity.
• High-density Fibre Channel switch with 16-Gbps connectivity: The Cisco MDS 9250i scales up to 40 ports of 16-Gbps Fibre Channel in a fixed configuration switch. The base configuration comes with 20 ports of 16‑Gbps Fibre Channel enabled for high-performance SAN connectivity, and it can be upgraded onsite to enable additional 20 ports of 16-Gbps Fibre Channel by adding the Cisco MDS 9250i On-Demand Port Activation license. Additionally, the Cisco MDS 9250i cost-effectively scales up for IBM Fibre Connection (FICON) mainframe environments[1].
• Intelligent application services engine: The Cisco MDS 9250i includes as standard a single application services engine that enables the included Cisco SAN Extension over IP software solution package to run on the two fixed 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet storage services ports. The Cisco SAN Extension over IP package provides an integrated, cost-effective, and reliable business-continuance solution that uses IP infrastructure by offering FCIP for remote SAN extension, along with a variety of advanced features to optimize the performance and manageability of FCIP links.
• Hardware-based virtual fabric isolation with Virtual SANs (VSANs) and Fibre Channel routing with Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR): VSANs and IVR enable deployment of large-scale multisite and heterogeneous SAN topologies. Integration into port-level hardware allows any port in a system or in a fabric to be partitioned into any VSAN. Included in the optional Cisco MDS 9000 Enterprise advanced software package, IVR provides line-rate routing between any of the ports in a system or in a fabric without the need for external routing appliances.
• Remote SAN extension with high-performance FCIP:

◦ Simplifies data protection and business continuance strategies by enabling backup, remote replication, and other disaster-recovery services over WAN distances using open-standards FCIP tunneling.

◦ Optimizes utilization of WAN resources for backup and replication by enabling hardware-based compression, hardware-based encryption, FCIP write acceleration, and FCIP tape read and write acceleration; up to 16 virtual Inter-Switch Link (ISL) connections are provided on the two 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet ports through tunneling.

◦ Preserves Cisco MDS 9000 Family enhanced capabilities, including VSANs, IVR, advanced traffic management, and network security across remote connections.

• Cost-effective iSCSI connectivity to Ethernet-attached servers:

◦ Extends the benefits of Fibre Channel SAN-based storage to Ethernet-attached servers at a lower cost than is possible using Fibre Channel interconnect alone.

◦ Increases storage utilization and availability through consolidation of IP and Fibre Channel block storage.

◦ Through transparent operation, preserves the capability of existing storage management applications.

• Advanced FICON services[2]: The Cisco MDS 9250i will support FICON environments, including cascaded FICON fabrics, VSAN-enabled intermix of mainframe and open systems environments, and N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) for mainframe Linux partitions. IBM Control Unit Port (CUP) support enables in-band management of Cisco MDS 9200 Series switches from the mainframe management console. FICON tape acceleration reduces latency effects for FICON channel extension over FCIP for FICON tape read and write operations to mainframe physical or virtual tape. This feature is sometimes referred to as tape pipelining. The Cisco MDS 9250i will also support the IBM Extended Remote Copy (XRC)[3] Acceleration feature that enables acceleration of dynamic updates for IBM z/OS Global Mirror, formerly known as XRC.
• Cisco Data Mobility Manager (DMM) as a distributed fabric service: Cisco DMM is a fabric-based data migration solution that transfers block data nondisruptively across heterogeneous storage volumes and across distances, whether the host is online or offline.
• Platform for intelligent fabric applications: The Cisco MDS 9250i provides an open platform that delivers the intelligence and advanced features required to make multilayer intelligent SANs a reality, including hardware-enabled innovations to host or accelerate applications for data migration, storage backup, and data replication. Hosting or accelerating these applications in the network can dramatically improve scalability, availability, security, and manageability of the storage environment, resulting in increased utility and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
• In Service Software Upgrade (ISSU) for Fibre Channel interfaces: Cisco MDS 9250i promotes high serviceability by allowing Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS Software to be upgraded while the Fibre Channel ports are carrying traffic.
• Intelligent network services: Cisco MDS 9250i uses VSAN technology for hardware-enforced, isolated environments within a single physical fabric, Access Control Lists (ACLs) for hardware-based intelligent frame processing, and advanced traffic management features such as fabric wide Quality of Service (QoS) to facilitate migration from SAN islands to enterprise wide storage networks.
• High-performance ISLs: Cisco MDS 9250i supports up to 16 Fibre Channel ISLs in a single PortChannel. Up to 253 buffer-to-buffer credits can be assigned to a single Fibre Channel port to extend storage networks over long distances.
• Comprehensive network security framework: The Cisco MDS 9250i supports RADIUS and TACACS+, Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol, Simple Network Management Protocol Version 3 (SNMPv3) implementing Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), VSANs, hardware-enforced zoning, ACLs, and per-VSAN Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). Additionally, the 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports offer IP Security (IPsec) authentication, data integrity, and hardware-assisted data encryption for FCIP and iSCSI.
• IP Version 6 (IPv6) capable: The Cisco MDS 9250i supports IPv6 as mandated by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), Japan, and China. IPv6 support is provided for FCIP, iSCSI, and management traffic routed inband and out of band.
• FIPS compliance: The Cisco MDS 9250i will be FIPS 140-2 compliant as mandated by the U.S. federal government.[4]
• Sophisticated diagnostics: The Cisco MDS 9250i provides intelligent diagnostics, protocol decoding, and network analysis tools as well as integrated Cisco Call Home capability for added reliability, faster problem resolution, and reduced service costs.

Cisco MDS 9100 Switch

Product overview

The next-generation Cisco MDS 9148T 32-Gbps 48-Port Fibre Channel Switch (Figure 1) provides high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity for All-Flash arrays. This switch offers state-of-the-art analytics and telemetry capability built into its next-generation Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) platform. This switch allows seamless transition to Fibre Channel Non-Volatile Memory Express (FC-NVMe) 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 smaller port groups of 16 ports. Benefits for a mid- to large-size SAN include higher scale for Fibre Channel control-plane functions, virtual SANs, fabric login (FLOGI), device alias and name server scale, 48 ports of 32-Gbps non-oversubscribed line-rate ports, bidirectional airflow, and a fixed-form FC-NVMe-ready SAN switch with enhanced Buffer-to-Buffer (B2B) credits connecting both storage and host ports and Fibre Channel link encryption. Large-scale SAN architectures built with SAN core directors can expand 32-Gbps connectivity to the server rack using these switches 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, read diagnostic parameter, link cable beacon,1 and advanced reliability features such as Forward Error Correction (FEC) with HBA ports.

Figure 1. Cisco MDS 9148T 32-Gbps 48-Port fibre channel switch

Main features

The main features of the Cisco MDS 9148T 32-Gbps 48-Port Fibre Channel Switch include:

• High performance: MDS 9148T architecture, with centralized nonblocking arbitration, provides consistent 32-Gbps low-latency performance across all traffic conditions for every Fibre Channel port on the switch.
• Fully integrated SAN analytics: This feature-rich switch also offers state-of-the-art SAN analytics and telemetry capabilities that have been built into this next-generation hardware platform. This new state-of-art technology couples the next-generation port ASIC with a fully dedicated Network Processing Unit designed to complete analytics calculations in real time on the 32-Gbps line card. The telemetry data extracted from the inspection of the frame headers are calculated on board (within the switch) and, using an industry-leading open format, can be streamed to any analytics-visualization platform.
• Capital Expenditures (CapEx) savings: The 32-Gbps ports allow users to deploy them with existing 16- or 8-Gbps transceivers provide investment protection with an option to upgrade to 32-Gbps transceivers and adapters whenever needed.
• High availability: MDS 9148T switches continue to provide the same outstanding availability and reliability as the previous-generation Cisco MDS 9000 Family switches by providing redundancy on all major components such as the power supply and fan. Dual power supplies also facilitate redundant power grids. In addition, port-channel link members can be striped across the three 16-port port groups, thus providing additional high availability.
• Reliability: As part of the standard 32-Gbps Fibre Channel specification, Cisco provides FEC between switch ports and HBA ports on all 32-Gbps Fibre Channel fixed switches. This feature helps ensure any error introduced in flight gets corrected before it reaches the device side. 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.
• Growth in small increments: The MDS 9148T Fibre Channel switch provides an option to deploy as few as twenty-four 32-Gbps Fibre Channel ports in the entry-level variant, which can grow in increments of 8 ports to up to 48 ports. This setup allows four possible configurations of 24, 32, 40, and 48 ports.
• Next-generation ASIC: The MDS 9148T Fibre Channel switch is powered by the same high-performance 32-Gbps Cisco ASIC that powers the Cisco MDS 32-Gbps Fibre Channel product portfolio.
• Higher scalability: Increased fabric scalability provides more flexibility for a variety of SAN architectures.
• Telemetry: Fibre Channel and Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) headers can be inspected without the need for any external taps or appliances. The resulting metrics can be analyzed on the switch and also exported using a dedicated 1- or 10-Gbps Small Form-Factor Pluggable Plus (SFP+) port for telemetry and analytics purposes#.
• Intelligent services: Auto-zone, Smart Zoning, slow-drain detection and isolation, Virtual SAN (VSAN) and Inter-VSAN routing (IVR), and fabricwide Quality of Service (QoS) enable migration from SAN islands to enterprise.wide storage networks. Traffic encryption is optionally available to meet stringent security requirements.
• Sophisticated diagnostics: The MDS 9148T provides intelligent diagnostics tools such as ISL diagnostics, HBA diagnostics, read diagnostic parameters, Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN), Integrated Cisco Call Home capability, and an Online Health Management System for greater reliability, faster problem resolution, and reduced service costs.
• Virtual-machine awareness: The MDS 9148T provides visibility into all virtual machines that are accessing the storage LUNs in the fabric. This feature is available through HBAs capable of priority tagging the Virtual Machine Identifier (VMID) on every Fibre Channel frame. Virtual-machine awareness can be extended to intelligent fabric services such as analytics1 to visualize performance of every flow originating from each virtual machine in the fabric.
• Programmable fabric: The MDS 9148T provides powerful Representational State Transfer (REST) and Cisco NX-API capabilities to enable flexible and rapid programming of utilities for the SAN.
• Single-pane management: You can provision, manage, monitor, and troubleshoot the MDS 9148T using Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM), which currently manages the entire suite of Cisco data center products.
• Secure-boot and anti-counterfeiting technology: The MDS 9148T 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.