This IBM® Redbooks® Product Guide describes the Cisco MDS 9706 Multilayer Director for IBM System Storage® (9710-E06). The MDS 9706 is a director-class SAN switch that is designed for deployment in small- to medium-sized storage networks that can support enterprise clouds and business transformation. It layers a comprehensive set of intelligent features onto a high-performance, protocol-independent switch fabric.
MDS 9706 addresses the stringent requirements of large virtualized data center storage environments. It delivers uncompromising availability, security, scalability, ease of management, and transparent integration of new technologies for flexible data center SAN solutions. It shares the same operating system and management interface with other Cisco data center switches. By using the MDS 9706, you can transparently deploy unified fabrics with Fibre Channel, IBM Fibre Connection (IBM FICON®), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) connectivity for low total cost of ownership (TCO).
For mission-critical enterprise storage networks that require secure, robust, cost-effective business-continuance services, the FCIP extension module is designed to deliver outstanding SAN extension performance, reducing latency for disk and tape operations with FCIP acceleration features, including FCIP write acceleration and FCIP tape write and read acceleration.
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