Storage and Storage Area Networks (SANs) consistently evolve with new technologies and transports. NVMe is the latest storage and networking technology and is changing how customers will look at their storage and networking requirements. This session will focus on SAN technologies in the Enterprise Data Center, how they are evolving, the technologies available and the partner ecosystem that only Cisco can offer.
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Kamal Bakshi, Principal Engineer, introduces Cisco’s NVMe storage transport solutions. He begins with a review of the history of storage transport, from FC-SCSI to iSCSI to FCoE, and discusses how flash storage is affected by these protocols. NVMe gives greater performance than SAS, and next-generation SANs will consist of an NVMe fabric using FC, InfiniBand, RoCE, or TCP. Cisco supports all modern storage transports, on the MDS and Nexus 9000 switches, as enterprises adopt end-to-end NVMe storage. Bakshi then discusses the emerging NVMe-FC fabric. The MDS Fibre Channel director features a crossbar architecture that is highly scalable and supports 64G FC on the same chassis. Enterprises can deploy NVMe storage anywhere using this Cisco network fabric. Bakshi also takes questions from the Storage Field Day delegates.
Personnel: Kamal Bakshi
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Paresh Gupta, Technical Marketing Engineer, discusses how Cisco can collect and present SAN analytics for NVMe-FC. He follows a NVMe-FC write operation from the initiator to the Cisco MDS switch to the target, recording storage access latency and exchange completion time. The Cisco MDS switch includes traffic inspection, metric calculation, and metric export. Gupta then demonstrates this metric collection for the Storage Field Day delegates and answers their questions about NVMe-FC storage analytics.
Personnel: Paresh Gupta
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Chris O’Brien, Technical Marketing Director, presents Cisco’s Data Center Modernization solutions in converged infrastructure. Cisco is working to accelerate adoption of converged infrastructure by configuring a base platform of Nexus, UCS, MDS, and partner storage technology for SAP, Oracle, AI/ML, VDI, and other applications. He focuses on Cisco’s FlexPod offering in partnership with NetApp, which today includes NVMe over fabric. He then presents FlashStack, in partnership with Oracle to support RAC 19c with NVMe and RoCE. He also discusses Cisco Intersight’s support of 3rd party devices through a Restful OpenAPI, DCNM, and APIC. Intersight Assist Appliances are available for VMware vCenter, Pure Storage, and others. He finishes with a discussion of the Intersight integration with Pure Storage before taking questions from the Storage Field Day delegates.
Personnel: Chris O'Brien
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Kamal Bakshi, Principal Engineer, presents IP fabric in the Cisco Nexus 9000. He focuses on some key challenges to NVMe/IP adoption: End point security, low latency, visibility, and automation. Cisco’s switches provide visibility into storage traffic, smart buffers improve latency performance, NXOS and ACI enable automation, and ACI also provides endpoint security.
Personnel: Kamal Bakshi
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