Cisco MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch

Superior Flexibility with Multi-protocol Innovations

The Cisco MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch provides superior flexibility in SAN connectivity by delivering state-of-the-art multiprotocol convergence and distributed fabric services, along with many advanced capabilities. With 50 fixed ports in a compact form factor, the Cisco 9250i brings high performance and scalable storage connectivity for converged LAN and SAN fabrics.

Features and Capabilities

Benefits:

• SAN consolidation and convergence with integrated multiprotocol support for Fibre Channel (FC), FC over Ethernet (FCoE), FCIP, iSCSI, and FICON
• Optimized for performance, power, and space, with 40 line-rate 16-Gbps FC ports and 10 10-Gbps Ethernet ports
• Remote SAN extension with high-performance FC over IP (FCIP) for remote replication and other disaster-recovery services
• Intelligent fabric services, such as I/O Accelerator (IOA) and Data Mobility Manager (DMM)
• Flexibility for future growth and capacity expansion

Features:

• Hardware-based virtual fabric isolation with virtual SANs (VSANs) and FC routing with Inter-VSAN Routing (IVR)
• Enterprise-class availability features for departmental SANs
• Intelligent network services and advanced traffic management capabilities
• Industry-leading SAN security to support compliance and regulatory requirements
• Common Cisco NX-OS and management platform (Cisco Prime Data Center Network Manager) across Cisco MDS and Nexus product families

Specifications at a Glance

Minimum Software Requirements

Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS Software Release 6.2, supporting Cisco MDS 9250i and Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) for SAN

Performance and Port Configuration

Port speed:

• 16, 8, 4, and 2 Gbps auto-sensing with 16 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth per Fibre Channel port
• 10 Gbps per FCoE and FCIP port

Buffer credits:

• 64 per port (shared-mode ports) and up to 256 on an individual port (dedicated-mode ports with optional Cisco MDS 9000 enterprise package license activated)

Ports per chassis:

• Up to 50 fixed ports, including 40 16-Gbps Fibre Channel, eight 10-Gbps FCoE, and two 10-Gbps FCIP and iSCSI ports
• Base configuration with 30 ports; includes 20 16-Gbps Fibre Channel, eight 10-Gbps FCoE, and two 10-Gbps FCIP and iSCSI ports
• Port activation license to upgrade license remaining 20 16-Gbps Fibre Channel ports

Intelligent Services

• SAN extension built in
• Cisco IOA and Cisco DMM activated by separate licenses

Advanced Functions

• Virtual SAN (VSAN)
• IVR
• Port channel with multipath load balancing
• Flow-based and zone-based QoS
• FCIP tape read-and-write acceleration and FCIP compression
• FICON over FCIP tape read-and-write acceleration (pipelining)