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As part of a two-pronged effort to support data growth, scale and programmability, Cisco has added innovations to its Cisco MDS, UCS and Nexus portfolios.
To increase the amount of data that can travel over a storage area network (SAN) while making it simpler to manage the overall storage environment, Cisco today added to its SAN director support for as many as 768 ports, a 40G Ethernet network option and support for REST application programming interfaces.
Adarsh Viswanathan, senior manager for data center product management at Cisco, says the MDS 9718 is designed to make it simpler for IT organizations to expand the amount of data flowing through their storage systems. This is done via software updates that increase both the port density of the MDS 9718 by supporting 32G Fibre channel connections and adding support for 40G Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) module.
By taking advantage of next-generation 16G Cisco Nexus switches, Viswanathan says, IT organizations can not only access 16G Fibre channel connections (e.g., a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)), they can easily employ 40G FCoE connections today or 32G Fibre channel connections tomorrow.
At the same time, Viswanathan says, Cisco is broadly embracing support for REST APIs. In the case of the MDS 9718, that means that not only is there better communication between MDS 9718 and Cisco management software, it’s also simpler to integrate the MDS 9718 with third-party IT management software.
In fact, as enterprise IT continues to evolve, IT organizations are about to discover how much simpler REST APIs will make swapping IT infrastructure in and out.
