The Cisco SFS 3000 Series Multifabric Server Switches combine a high performance InfiniBand server interconnect with Ethernet and Fibre Channel gateways to allow an entire fabric of servers to share virtualized pools of I/O and storage resources connected through Ethernet or Fibre Channel switches such as Cisco Catalyst or Cisco MDS switches. The switches can be deployed as standalone elements for small fabrics or used at the edge of a large fabric of Cisco SFS 7000 Series InfiniBand Server Switches. They are designed to reach beyond legacy clustering solutions to transform high-performance server clusters into flexible computing grids.

Features

• Virtual I/O for Fibre Channel allows a group of servers to share a pool of centralized Fibre Channel I/O resources. Translates between SCSI over InfiniBand (SRP) and FCP at the gateway, and allows an SRP initiator to concurrently talk through multiple shared connections.
• Topology Transparency Creates unique World-Wide-Names for every virtual HBA, enabling InfiniBand-attached hosts to seamless connect with existing Fibre Channel storage and management tools.
• Support Seamless support for existing multipathing tools, including EMC Powerpath, etc.
• Load Distribution Centralized connection manager dynamically distributes sessions across multiple gateways.
• Storage Access Controls Compatible with existing switch-based zoning and LUN-based access controls. Multifabric Server Switch also includes support for port and LUN access controls via storage management GUI.
• Storage Traffic Monitoring Creates graphs and reports on storage performance statistics on individual or aggregated ports.
• Boot over SAN/LUN Remapping Enables InfiniBand-attached servers to boot remotely over the SAN via LUN remapping.