Plentiful Ports from Cisco

Cisco announced a series of upgrades to their MDS line of storage switches at Storage Networking World in San Diego last week.  Maximum port counts were upgraded to a whopping 528 ports per director; 4 and 10 Gbps support was added across the entire MDS product lineup; and a new larger director chassis was introduced.

In my opinion the bottom line with this announcement is two-fold:

1. Cisco has the biggest director on the planet from a port count perspective

Cisco now tops out at 528 ports per director compared to 256 ports for McData and Brocade.   Brocade and McData argue that you can't use all of those ports at full speed at the same time which is true - only 132 ports can be run simultaneously at 4 Gbps.  I contend that this "over-subscription"  issue is a non-starter for most data center managers.   Fibre Channel networks are typically configured in an over-subscribed manner. Each port into a shared storage system is typically shared by many servers - up to eight or more is common.  Yeah, full bandwidth into and out of all ports in a director is architecturally more predictable, but given the low utilization rates on most FC networks, and the trends towards scaled-out clustered architectures and server consolidation, I believe Cisco with more ports per director is solving the more pressing need  - more connectivity.  In other words, I believe that for the majority of users, more ports in a singly managed platform is more desirable than guaranteed line rate on every port.

2. Investment protection

New 4 Gbps and 10 Gbps plug-in modules are supported on previous generation MDS frames. In other words, customers who bought and deployed MDS in the past can take advantage of new plug-ins without having to buy a new frame. And four Gbps FC is backwards compatible with previously deployed 2 Gbps and 1 Gbps networks.  And the new plug-ins work with older storage intelligence and network services plug-ins.  Add it all up and you get one product family with backwards and forwards investment protection.