Addressing the ever-increasing demand for storage in today's IT environments, driven by explosive data growth from video applications, the Internet of Everything (IoE) and Big Data, Cisco(NASDAQ:CSCO) has announced next-generation storage area networking (SAN) additions for its Data Center portfolio. According to the EMC Digital Universe Study with research and analysis by IDC, April 2014, data produced will grow ten times by 2020, from 4.4ZB today to 44ZB; 32 billion Internet of Things devices will be connected to the Internet; 40 per cent of data will be touched by cloud; and enterprises will have liability and responsibility for 85 per cent of all data. To better manage the resulting performance, scale, and operational management challenges, Cisco has continued to innovate multi-protocol storage networking solutions for its unified data center portfolio that merge data center networking and compute functions into one data center fabric, for more efficient business operations and end-to-end management.
Cisco has made a strong investment in its SAN product portfolio to meet performance, reliability, scalability, and flexibility requirements for the decade ahead. With more than 125,000 storage networking switches installed at over 20,000 customer sites, the Cisco MDS portfolio offers the highest investment protection and reliability for customer data storage networks.
Cisco introduced the first two members of its 16G fibre channel family - Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director and MDS 9250i MultiServices Switch - in 2013. With today’s announcement of the Cisco MDS 9148S Multilayer Fabric Switch, Cisco MDS 9706 Director, and the Cisco MDS 9700 FCoE module, Cisco has a complete 16G portfolio from top-of-rack small SAN switches to the largest SAN products. Furthermore, Cisco provides a complete end-to-end unified data center fabric that is powered by the same NX-OS operating system across its award-winning product line – Cisco Nexus for data center Ethernet networking, Cisco MDS for storage networking, and Cisco UCS for compute.
