- Value: Integrated design lowers TCO through consolidation: The Cisco MDS 9124e Fabric Switch hot-plugs into the back of the HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosure, freeing up rack space. Interconnect for servers and switches internal to the BladeSystem reduces cabling, SFPs and associated costs. Shared power and cooling resources further reduces cost and additional points of failure.
- Agility: Exceptional performance and scalability: Employs high speed technology for storage networking. Up to eight external facing ports auto-sense lower bandwidth components for greater flexibility and investment protection (4, 2, or 1Gbps).
- High availability: Designed for environments where downtime is not an option. Up to six FC switches are supported in the BladeSystem enclosure. Hot-pluggable design supports non-disruptive upgrades, VSANs for fault isolation, and PortChannels for ISL resiliency.
- Flexible licensing: Dynamic and growing businesses require the flexibility to manage their investment wisely. Designed to scale as business needs dictate with the option of a 12-port model and a 12-port upgrade license.
- Traffic management: Simplifies deployment while optimizing core edge fabrics with support for virtual output queuing, flexible buffer credit allocation, PortChannels, Fabric Shortest Path First (FSPF), and more.
- VSAN support: Support for up to 16 VSANs per switch that can be zoned as its own fabric enables efficiency, lower cost through shared usage, the flexibility of independent configuration control, and increased security through isolation of devices on the same physical SAN.
- Long distance support: Individual ports can be configured with short-, medium, or long-wavelength SFP optics for connectivity of up to 10 kilometers.
- Simplicity: Broad range of management options: Simple and consistent with support by the Cisco MDS 9000 family management tools including a CLI, Cisco Fabric Manager and a standards-based API supporting SNMP and SMI-S. Also supported by HP unified server and storage management tools including HP Onboard Administrator, HP SIM, and HP Storage Essentials.
- Comprehensive security: Offers an extensive security framework to protect highly sensitive data crossing today's enterprise networks.
- Advanced diagnostics and troubleshooting tools: Integrates the industry's most advanced analysis and debugging tools for proactive diagnostics, verification of connectivity and route latency, and capturing and analyzing traffic.
The Cisco MDS 9124e Fabric Switch for HP c-Class BladeSystem, a 4Gbps Fibre Channel switch, delivers a high performance option for HP BladeSystem c-Class customers deploying storage area networks in their enterprise. The integrated design frees up rack space, enables a reduction of components such as cables and SFPs, and utilizes shared power and cooling within the BladeSystem enclosure. This solution results in space and cost savings as well as higher levels of availability through fewer points of failure. The hot-pluggable design, as well as support for non-disruptive software upgrades and the unique ability to automatically and statefully restart failed processes, further enhances the availability features of the overall solution. The Cisco MDS 9124e Fabric Switch supports VSAN, an industry standard for fabric virtualization enabling more efficient network use by creating hardware-based isolated environments within a single physical SAN fabric or switch.