Cisco expands its Storage Networking Portfolio

The demand for storage in IT environment is only going to rise with time. Hence Cisco in order to meet the ever-increasing demand driven by explosive data growth from video applications, the Internet of Everything (IoE) and Big Data has announced next-generation storage area networking (SAN) additions for its Data Center portfolio.

According to IDC's EMC Digital Universe Study with research and analysis, April 2014, data produced will grow 10 times by 2020, from 4.4ZB today to 44ZB; 32 bn Internet of Things devices will be connected to the internet; 40% of data will be touched by cloud; and enterprises will have liability and responsibility for 85 % of all data.

For more efficient business operations and end-to-end management Cisco has continued to develop its multi-protocol storage networking solutions. This is connected to the working of unified data centre portfolio that merge data center networking and compute functions into one data center fabric.

All in all it will help in better managing the resulting performance, scale, and operational management challenges.

Cisco has made a huge investment in its SAN product portfolio already 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 fiber 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 Cisco Nexus for data center Ethernet networking, Cisco MDS for storage networking, and Cisco UCS for compute.