The Cisco MDS 9500 Multilayer Director elevates the standard for director-class switches. The Cisco MDS 9500 Series allows the deployment of high-performance SANs with the lowest TCO. Layering a rich set of intelligent features onto a high-performance, open-protocol switch fabric, the Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors address the stringent requirements of large data center storage environments, providing high availability and ease of management and transparent integration of new technologies.

Features

• Up to 528 1/2/4-Gbps autosensing Fibre Channel ports
• Up to 44 10-Gbps Fibre Channel ports in a single chassis
• Up to 1584 Fibre Channel ports in a single rack
• Up to 2.2Tbps per system fully redundant crossbar bandwidth. Each crossbar offers full system bandwidth such that the loss or removal of a single crossbar does not impact system performance, ensuring 100% system throughput even in the event of a crossbar failure.
• 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.
• Supports RADIUS and TACACS+, Fibre Channel Security Protocol (FC-SP), 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, ACLs, and per-VSAN role-based access control.
• Provides intelligent diagnostics, protocol decoding, and network analysis tools, as well as integrated call-home capability for added reliability, faster problem resolution, and reduced service costs.
• The Cisco MDS 9500 Series includes built-in storage network management with all features available through a command-line interface (CLI) or Cisco Fabric Manager, a centralized management tool that simplifies management of multiple switches and fabrics. Integration with third party storage management platforms allows seamless interaction with existing management tools.