Cisco Systems MDS 9000 manual Virtual SANs VSANs

The MDS 9000 Family consists of the MDS 9500 Series of Multilayer Directors and the MDS 9216 Multilayer fabric switch. The MDS 9000 Family products are modular systems that are optimized for high port density and performance for data center applications. For remote data centers used for backup and disaster recovery, the MDS 9216 Multilayer Fabric Switch provides a smaller product with all the same features and services as the MDS 9500 Family Directors.

In addition to the scale of these switching devices, the Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Directors and Fabric Switches also provides an extensive list of features and services including Virtual SANs, advanced ISL link aggregation, LUN zoning, Call-Home, high availability, and hitless firmware upgrades. One of the issues plaguing most customers today is the lack of manageability and tools to allow for adequate support of a storage network. The Cisco MDS 9000 Family of products includes a robust embedded fabric manager application providing configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting of storage networks.

Virtual SANs (VSANs)

In many existing environments, backup solution design involved building a separate parallel network for backup traffic. From technical and operational points of view, this separate network approach provides a flexible, secure, and highly available backup solution albeit at a higher cost. The isolation of the tape storage network from the disk storage network eliminates an application-level impact due to failures such as a power reset of a tape library unit (TLU). The separate networks also protect against backup failures caused by a reset in a device on the application domain. It has thus become a de facto general practice to isolate tape devices from disk subsystems. With this isolation, a fabric configuration change remains local and nondisruptive fueling the continued deployment of segregated SANs.

While these separate storage networks help guarantee performance alleviate fabric wide disruptions, it is an expensive solution requiring separate switches and additional management complexity. In addition, this often leads to wasted ports that can also be costly to customers deploying these solutions. Cisco delivers advanced technology revolutionizing storage network deployments using a capability called a Virtual SAN or VSAN. VSANs provide a method of building separate virtually isolated fabric atop the same redundant physical infrastructure. VSANs therefore guarantee security and isolation of SAN domains as required in these designs. Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Directors and Fabric Switches have the ability to create up to 4092 isolated VSAN topologies or layouts within the same physical infrastructure. This implementation is somewhat analogous to a VLAN in an Ethernet network. VSANs revolutionize SAN deployments by leveraging proven technology and ease of configuration of Ethernet networks to provide features like traffic isolation and security in a SAN environment. Some key features of VSANs are listed below:

•VSANs are isolated from each other using explicit tags placed on Fibre Channel frames to guarantee no leakage of frames from one VSAN to another.

•The implementation of VSANs allow for Domain IDs and FC_IDs to be reused within different VSANs

•Each VSAN has its own set of fabric services including zone server, name server, etc.

•Within each VSAN, a user can create zone sets as they would on a normal fabric

•A zone cannot span multiple VSANs.

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