back to article Highway to the auto-zone: Cisco is catching up to Brocade in Fibre Channel speed race

Cisco is releasing two auto-zoning 48 and 96-port Fibre Channel switches to speed up networking in data centres with all-flash arrays. The switches are accompanied by updated diagnostics and SAN management software. As all-flash arrays are increasingly used in data centres, their IO demands crank up the storage networking …

  1. baspax

    MDS Diagnostics

    MDS Diagnostics is Virtual Instruments, OEMed into Cisco MDS switches. Doesn't require TAP and SAN rover which is a huge deal.

    We ran a massive array of VI instrumentation across all our VMAX arrays and it's a storage admins dream. We could pin point individual FC frames and IO, correlate with DB IO, determine application performance on the SAN in real time. Cache hits, cache misses, we could identify misconfigured RAID sets just by looking at FC frame statistics. Ridiculously good stuff.

    If I understand correctly it's now available in all 16 and 32G MDS switches.

  2. Dwarf

    Automatic zoning

    What could possibly go wrong ?

    Security, oh, yes,we’ve heard about that too.

  3. CheesyTheClown

    How about horses for carts?

    I wonder how Cisco is holding up on horses for horse drawn carts? Are they doing well there?

    Any nifty tools to speed up Morse code for telegraph?

    Oh.. they have NVMe fabric stuff too? I wonder how many suckers will buy into that?

    I hear Cisco has some great stuff for making telephone more nifty too.

  4. Androgynous Cow Herd

    Buying Cisco gear for FC...

    Is a lot like buying Brocade gear for IP traffic.

    Cisco is #2 in a 2 vendor industry.

    1. baspax

      Re: Buying Cisco gear for FC...

      Bullshit.

      Brocade ALWAYS sucked with directors, switches were kinda ok.

      Brocade never had FC director leadership. McData had. Once Cisco grabbed leadership Brocade bought McData only to kill the tech and keep DCX.

      Cisco FC biz is way bigger than Brocade.

    2. G Olson

      Re: Buying Cisco gear for FC...

      And for many in the SMB market, #2 (if that assertion is true) is just fine. I have been evaluating MDS vs multiple other FC switches thru 4/8/16 Gb for a decade. And IOS makes more sense and is more akin to other networking OS configurations than the Brocade dialect. Whoever thought that Brocade dialect up is still living in 640K memory land.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like