Cisco Storage Area Networking Reviews & Insights

We use Cisco Storage Area Networking in our organization to provide connectivity between our All Flash storage box and our SQL Servers. These servers require a low latency network to access their data located in our NVMe storage box. We have found that their capabilities are quite robust and the management effort in order to keep them updated are quite small. They haven't given us any issues or significant incidents with the technology, this gives complete peace of mind.

The best scenario where we found the Cisco Storage Area Networking is best suited is for an architecture where we need a robust technology that provides high level SLAs regarding downtime due to maintenance activities. Our infrastructure provides the core to our Data analytics team, which provides the data needed for our commercial and management leaders to make the right decisions thanks to the data. We need our infrastructure to be robust and reliable, when it runs smoothly, we can focus on other aspects of IT Infrastructure areas, giving our inside business clients the service they need.

We use a mix of MDS 9248, and 9396 fabric switches to support FC SAN Fabrics. These [Cisco MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Switches] provide FC SAN Fabric to virtualized VMware environments and for bare-metal hosts running either Windows or Red Hat. The MDS's enable us to have a standard method of presenting FC fabric across the facility. We are currently visiting the implementation of [stretched] FC fabric through DWDM to replace FCIP replication between storage arrays.

[Cisco MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Switches] provide an enterprise class SAN fabric for the consumption of storage devices across a multitude of devices within the datacenter. MDS is well suited to provide storage presentation to Virtualized environments (VMware in our case) and for bare metal hosts. The 9200 and 9300 family are capable to provide this without the requirement for a larger director switch within the datacenter. Whilst configuration through the CLI is preferred, DCNM still falls short of being able to provide a single pane of glass without additional expensive licenses.

Cisco MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Switches are used with our UCS chassis and fiber interconnect. They provide the connection to storage for all of our virtual desktops and servers. They are used for the whole organization and are the backbone for all traffic that needs to go to the storage devices.

Cisco MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Switches are best used where you need multiple devices connected to multiple storage devices. They work well in the Cisco UCS family. We use them for all virtual desktops and servers. They connects the UCS chassis to storage devices through the fiber interconnect. Once the zoning is configured, there is no need to touch the device.