Cisco SAN NVMe/FC Analytics

2019: Submission of the solution SAN NVMe/FC Analytics

On September 16, 2019 the Cisco company provided a number of innovations in the field of storage area networks (Storage Area Networking, SAN). Among them – the solution SAN NVMe/FC Analytics for the deep analysis of SAN networks. Initially the Cisco company presented the solution SAN Analytics with support of FC-SCSI for the deep analysis of SAN networks. Adding of support of the NVMe/FC protocol, according to the developer, allows to open all opportunities of this solution completely. Irrespective of the used protocol, FC-SCSI or NVMe/FC, the solution Cisco will give the broad picture of the events, including all products of the Cisco 32Gbps portfolio, beginning from the small systems with 8 ports to systems with support of 768 ports in one chassis.

As noted in Cisco, with development of technologies of storage also requirements to to transport the major workloads grow. Earlier uniform and monolithic construction expanded and as a result includes the diverse technologies competing for resources of high-speed links Fibre Channel. Emergence of protocols of NVMe/FC requires the solution of a number of questions which were delivered in connection with the high performance and speed of functioning storage devices all-flash.

According to representatives of Cisco, NVMe technology, introducing parallelism in the existing infrastructures, continues to stimulate further development. It is necessary to realize completely how this technology from the very first day influences and should influence implementation processes. Cisco expanded functionality of SAN Analytics, having included in it the NVMe/FC protocol, having provided thereby transport and a complete end-to-end overview both for FC-SCSI, and for NVMe/FC.

According to the statement of the developer, the analytical solution SAN NVMe/FC Analytics for all portfolio 64/32Gbps allows to investigate any unrolled system, from separate nodes (pod) to storage systems of a corporate class. It concerns not only tanks, but also analytical information which can be received from the first day of start of infrastructure of data storage. A system will allow to learn in what a problem source — in network or in the storage device and also to browse archive metrics of performance for the past day or for last week:

• The expanded overview accelerates fault finding on all workloads.
• The solution SAN Analytics supports the FC-SCSI and NVMe/FC protocols:
• It is supported all portfolios 32G:
  • MDS9706, MDS9710, MDS9718 (with line cards 32Gbps)
  • MDS9396T
  • MDS9148T
  • MDS9132T

• Reduction of operating costs: process of deployment becomes simpler thanks to acceleration of debugging and fault finding at the level of all factory.