The next-generation Cisco^® MDS 9396T 32-Gbps 96-Port 2-rack unit Fibre Channel Switch (Figure 1) provides high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity in the SAN. This switch offers state-of-art analytics and telemetry capability built into its next-generation Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) platform. The Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe)-ready switch allows seamless transition to Fibre Channel Non-Volatile Memory Express (FC-NVMe) workloads whenever available without any hardware upgrade in the SAN. This high-density, highly reliable and scalable, enterprise class switch is ideal for medium to large departmental SANs.

For standalone SANs, this switch can serve dense hyperscale server environments that spawn thousands of virtual Host Bus Adapters (vHBAs) serving several virtual machine instances, providing each of them with predictable throughput, consistent latency and highly available paths by distributing the physical SAN connectivity across six different port groups of 16 ports each. Autozone allows these standalone deployments to benefit from automatic zoning of host and storage ports without requiring any manual zoning configuration. These smaller port groups enable a design with smaller failure domains rather than one large failure domain consisting of all switch ports.

The number of hosts can be expanded further by connecting this switch as an N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) core switch to any existing top-of-rack switch in N-Port Virtualization (NPV) mode. Large-scale departmental SANs can deploy this switch as end-of-row, middle-of-row, or even top-of-rack in either forward or reverse airflow directions, connecting to existing MDS directors in the SAN core.