Enable convergence, scalability, and intelligence in large, virtualized data centers with the Cisco^®MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module. With industry-leading port densities of line-rate 16-Gbps Fibre Channel ports per director chassis, intelligent fabric services such as integrated VSANs, Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR), and PortChannels, the Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module (Figure 1) enables deployment of large, scalable, and virtualized data centers.

The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module is designed for the most demanding storage networking environments. It delivers full-duplex aggregate performance of 768 Gbps, making it well suited for high-speed 16-Gbps storage subsystems, 16-Gbps Inter-Switch Links (ISLs), and high-performance virtualized servers.

The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module enables you to consolidate SAN deployments with fewer hardware components. You can consolidate workloads from hundreds of virtual machines with high performance, and scale with incremental updates as your SAN grows - all while protecting your existing investment. The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module also provides Cisco VMpath technology that enables advanced virtual machine-aware SAN provisioning and monitoring for virtualized data centers. With Cisco VMpath, you can monitor, manage, and control SAN resource allocation and performance on a per-virtual machine basis, and map paths all the way from the server to storage enabling end-to-end tracking of mission-critical workloads.

The Cisco MDS 9700 48-Port 16-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module is hot swappable and compatible with 2/4/8-Gbps, 4/8/16-Gbps, and 10-Gbps Fibre Channel interfaces and supports hot-swappable Enhanced Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP+) transceivers. It also supports 10 Gigabit Ethernet clocked optics carrying 10-Gbps Fibre Channel traffic. Individual ports can be configured with Cisco 16-Gbps, 8-Gbps, or 10-Gbps SFP+ transceivers. Each port supports 500 buffer credits for exceptional extensibility without requiring additional licensing. With the Cisco Enterprise Package license, up to 4095 buffer credits can be allocated to an individual port, enabling full link bandwidth over long distances with no degradation in link utilization.

The 16-Gbps Fibre Channel switching module also provides previously available features such as predictable performance and high availability, advanced traffic management capabilities, integrated VSANs and IVR, resilient high-performance ISLs, comprehensive security frameworks, fault detection and isolation of errored packets, and sophisticated diagnostics.