Cisco MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel switch brings the latest high-performance, low-latency Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) technology to market. Along with higher bandwidth, the Cisco MDS 9396V switch supports ease of configuration and management, detailed and in-depth performance insights, and automation capabilities.

Product overview

The Cisco MDS 9396V 64-Gbps 96-Port Fibre Channel Switch (Figure 1) provides high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity for all-flash arrays and high-performance hosts. This switch offers state-of-the-art analytics and telemetry capabilities built into its next-generation Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC). This switch allows seamless transition to Fibre Channel Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe/FC) workloads. It empowers 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 small port groups of 24 ports. Benefits for a mid- to large-size SAN include higher scale for Fibre Channel control-plane functions such as virtual SANs, fabric login (FLOGI), device aliases, and name servers. The Cisco MDS 9396V switch has 96 ports of 64-Gbps non-oversubscribed line-rate ports, bidirectional airflow, and a fixed-form NVMe/FC-ready SAN switch with enhanced Buffer-to-Buffer (B2B) credits; it is also capable of hardware-assisted Fibre Channel link encryption. Large-scale SAN architectures built with SAN core directors can expand 64-Gbps connectivity to the server rack using these switches configured in either switch mode or N Port Virtualization (NPV) mode. Additionally, the switch supports enhanced diagnostic features such as Inter-Switch Link (ISL) and Host-Bus-Adapter (HBA) diagnostics, remote port and SFP (Read Diagnostic Parameter) diagnostics, remote port beaconing (Link Cable Beaconing) and advanced reliability features such as Forward Error Correction (FEC).