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Cisco slings speedier SAN switches

Model 9718 bears the number of The Beast, Cisco swears

Cisco's taken the whip to the FibreChannel horse, shipping a bunch of kit ready for the next iteration of the venerable storage area network (SAN) standard.

In the kind of cutesy marketing-speak that makes people want to set fire to blog posts, The Borg reckons its 32G-ready, 768-16G-port MDS 9718 Director is called “the beast”. El Reg hopes there aren't too many deployment war stories, or Borg blogster Tony Antony will regret the coinage.

The chassis density comes from its support for 16 48-port FibreChannel modules (with auto-sensing for 2, 4, 8 or 16 Gbps connections).

If Ethernet is more to your taste, the chassis can pack the same number of FibreChannel over Ethernet modules running at 10 Gbps, or 16 24-port FcoE modules at 40 Gbps. The 40 Gbps FCoE is delivered by way of a new module.

There's also a 16 Gbps FibreChannel, FCoE and Ethernet standalone switch (the Nexus 5672UP-16G), two single-RU 16 Gbps/40 Gbps switches for the Cisco Unified Computing System (US).

There's the obligatory nod towards software-defined networking, with the MDS 9718 Director supporting REST API calls directly to the switch. The NX-OS operating system also gets a RESTful refresh. ®

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