Director SAN switch gets top ratings management and feature columns

摘要

Cisco's done it again. Packed with 112 ports of 2G bit/sec Fibre Channel, the latest version of Cisco's MDS 9509 delivers a feature set, management interface and performance that earned it our Clear Choice designation. We first viewed this Cisco storage-area network switch early last year (see www.nwfusion.com, DocFinder 1824). The latest software (Version 1.3(3)) supports new quality-of-service (QoS) traffic classes and routing between virtual SAN (VSAN) groups. Additionally new optional modules deliver storage virtualization and caching capabilities. The switch hardware base is the same and earned it a near-perfect performance score, although this rating dipped a bit because this round of testing was more extensive and a tad more critical.