Brochure Cisco MDS 9000 10-Gbps 8-Port FCoE Module Extends Fibre Channel over Ethernet to the Data Center Core Executive Summary Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) can help you save money, simplify your management, lower your overall power and cooling requirements, and make your data center more flexible over time. The ability to converge storage and data networking with a single data center OS to deliver seamless convergence, scalability and network intelligence is ® now possible with the Cisco MDS 9000 10-Gbps 8-Port FCoE Module, extending these FCoE-based benefits to the core of your data center. Introduction The Cisco MDS 9000 10-Gbps 8-Port FCoE Module (Figure 1) is the industry’s first multihop-capable FCoE module for the data center core. Now you can extend the benefits of FCoE beyond the access layer to the data center core with a full line-rate FCoE module for the Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors. The Cisco MDS 9000 10-Gbps 8-Port FCoE Module is part of the Cisco unified fabric, which is a crucial building block for both traditional and virtualized data centers. Figure 1. Cisco MDS 9000 10-Gbps 8-Port FCoE Module Business Benefits Enterprises networks are growing rapidly, challenging data centers to manage power, cooling, and space. In response, enterprises are both building new data centers and looking for ways to extend the life of existing data centers to get the most from their investments now and in the future. The Power of Converged Fabric The data center traditionally handles several types of traffic, each with its own dedicated equipment and capacity. Over time network capacity needs to be increased, but at different intervals for different types of traffic. This staggered approach can lead to wasted bandwidth or worse, the difficult decision to increase capacity for some types of traffic only, at the expense of not being able to afford to increase capacity for other types. © 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 1 of 3

Brochure A converged fabric using converged network protocols such as FCoE allows customers to wire once to connect to any device on the SAN and LAN, even mapping to virtual machines. FCoE in particular takes advantage of the more efficient encoding mechanisms of 10 Gigabit Ethernet to provide 50 percent more bandwidth than 8-Gbps Fibre Channel. Thus for the same bandwidth, you use fewer links than with 8-Gbps Fibre Channel alone. Used in combination with low-cost media options such as Twinax cables, the Cisco MDS 9000 10-Gbps 8-Port FCoE Module helps align the data center with the economic benefits...

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