Cisco at VMworld 2015

1. Cisco MDS 9000 and
EMC XtremIO Flash
Arrays
Mark Allen
Building Best-of-Breed Storage Solutions

2. 2© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Evolution:
A process of continuous change
from a lower, simpler, or worse to a
higher, more complex, or better
state*
• * Merriam-Webster definition

3. 3© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Spinning disk has been the standard for Data Center storage for
decades
• Performance and speed have increased while cost has decreased
The introduction of Flash storage is revolutionizing Data Center storage
• Dramatic increases in performance over spinning disk
• Reduced cost of ownership makes flash a more competitive storage choice
• Increased functionality to meet Enterprise needs
Evolution of Storage

4. 4© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Why Flash Storage?
• Application Responsiveness
• Increased Virtualization
• Reducing Performance Gap
• Flash Storage increases
performance for random and
sequential data access
• Data Deduplication uses storage
more efficiently
• Flash Storage provides
consistent performance as well
as benefits in power and space

5. 5© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
• Scale Out Architectures
• High Availability and Reliability
• Multi-tenancy support
• Simplicity of Management
Cisco Storage Networking and EMC XtremIO
Flash Arrays
Synergy of Solutions

6. 6© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
5-120TB Based on 10 & 20 TB X-Bricks
150K MIXED IOPS
250K READ IOPS
<1MS LATENCY
900K MIXED IOPS
1.5M READ IOPS
<1MS LATENCY
• Designed for Scalable growth for
new or existing deployments
• Linear performance growth
• Consistent latency
XtremIO Scale Out Architecture

7. 7© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Non-oversubscribed Line Rate 16 Gbps Ports
MDS
9148S
MDS
9396S
MDS 9706 MDS 9710
12 - 48
48 - 384• Scalable Solutions for different
sized deployments
• Line rate performance with no
over-subscription
• Consistent, Predictable
performance
Cisco MDS Scale Out Architecture

8. 8© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Crossbar Switch with Central Arbitration
Ingress
Egress
Crossbar
Control and
Scheduling
Cisco MDS Architecture
• Crossbar establishes a temporary
connection between input and output
port for duration of the frame exchange
• Frames are not transmitted unless
there is an available path
• Scheduler uses arbiter grants to
provide traffic fairness and QoS
• Virtual Output Queues used to
eliminate HOL blocking

9. 9© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Fabric
Crossbar
Switch
Fabric
Fabric
Crossbar
Switch
Fabric
Fabric
Crossbar
Switch
Fabric
• Frames always follow same logic – ingress to egress (consistent switching latency)
• Newer generation line cards use fewer components compared to first generation line cards, however, the frame
forwarding logic is the same
Sup
Central
Arbiter
Egress Access Control and QoS
Forwarding and Load balancing
Inter VSAN Routing
Sup
Central
Arbiter
Cisco MDS Frame Flow
MAC
Port Type / Modes:
• F_Port
• Loop port (FL_Port)
• ISL (E_Port)
• EISL (TE_Port)
• SPAN Port (SD_Port)
PHY / MAC Forwarding
Queuing
PHY
Optical to Electrical
interface:
• SFP+ (2/4/8/10/16 Gbps)
Error Checking
Timestamp
VSAN Header
Linecard
Access Control
Forwarding and Load balancing
Inter VSAN Routing
Interface Statistics
Buffering and Virtual Output Queues
QoS
Arbitration Requests
Redundant Arbiters
Transmit, loopback or Expire frame
Remove VSAN header (end device) or prepend
EISL header (EISL to Cisco switch) Redundant crossbar fabrics

10. 10© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
FC, FCoE Modules
Cisco MDS 9700 - Designed for Scale
1
2
3
4
5
6
Host Ports
Number of Fabric
Cards
FC Bandwidth per Slot FCoE Bandwidth per Slot
1 256 Gbps 220 Gbps
2 512 Gbps 440 Gbps
3 768 Gbps 660 Gbps
4 1024 Gbps 880 Gbps
5 1280 Gbps 1100 Gbps
6 1536 Gbps 1320 Gbps

11. 11© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
• Disk Array Enclosure (DAE):
• 13 or 25 eMLC SSDs
• Two redundant power supply units (PSUs)
• Two redundant SAS interconnect modules
• One Battery Backup Unit
• Two 1U Storage Controllers:
• Two redundant Power Supply Units
(PSUs)
• Two 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) ports
• Two 10GbE iSCSI ports
• Two 40Gb/s InfiniBand ports
EMC XtremIO X-Brick High Availability
Disk Array Enclosure
(DAE)
Storage Controller
Storage Controller
Battery Backup Unit

12. 12© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
• Grid Redundant Power Supplies
• Two (MDS 9148S, MDS 9396S)
• Four (MDS 9706)
• Eight (MDS 9710)
• Redundant Fan Modules
• Two (MDS 9148S, MDS 9396S)
• Three multi-fan (MDS 9706, MDS 9710)
• Redundant Supervisors (MDS 9706, MDS 9710)
Cisco MDS High Availability
MDS 9148S
MDS 9396S
MDS 9706
MDS 9710

13. 13© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
High Availability extended beyond the physical
switch
• MDS Port Channels reduce failure domains by
allowing ISLs to be spread over:
• Different Line Cards
• Different ASICs
• Different Port-groups
• Scalable - Up to 16 ISL per Port Channel, up to
16 Port Channels between switches
• Flexible – add ports and/or Port Channels as
needed
MDS PortChannels
Cisco MDS 9000 Port Channels – Fabric
High Availability

14. 14© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
• Low data protection capacity
overhead of 8%
• Automatic rebuild in case of drive
failure
• Incoming Data Protection
Robustness
• Administrative ease through fail-
in-place support
EMC XtremIO Data Protection (XDP)
Capacity
Utilization
Superior
Protection
High
Performance

15. 15© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Cisco MDS 9000 Fabric Protection
CRC Detection and 16 Gbps FC Forward Error Correction (FEC)
Ingress
CRC
checking
Internal
CRC
checking
Forward
Error
Correction
Drop
frame
Drop
frame
• Faulty equipment, loose SFPs,
dirty or damaged cables, can
result in packets getting
corrupted
• CRC Checking drops corrupted
frames from end devices or
internally corrupted frames
• FEC corrects frames corrupted
in-flight to preserve frames

16. 16© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Snapshots can be used to allow
simultaneous Development and
Operations (DevOps)
• Leverages content-aware capabilities
of the system (Inline Data Reduction)
• Unique metadata tree structure
directs I/O to the right timestamp of
the data
• Metadata shared between all
snapshot blocks that have not been
changed from the snapshot's original
ancestor
EMC XtremIO Multi-tenancy

17. 17© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Option to use QoS within SAN for multi-tenancy
• User defined QoS values
• Allows different application to have different priority
(ie Development/Test vs. Production)
Cisco MDS QoS - Multi-tenancy within the
SAN
B
A
CCCC
BACCCCCACB
ARB
Input
port
Output
Port
Output
Port
Output
Port
DWRR Weight
Priority Absolute
Queue 2 60
Queue 3 10
Queue 4 30
Application “A”
Application “B”
Application “C”
DWRR Weight
Priority Absolute
Queue 2 70
Queue 3 20
Queue 4 10
DWRR Weight
Priority Absolute
Queue 2 55
Queue 3 30
Queue 4 15

18. 18© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Virtualization for SANs
• SAN islands virtualized onto common physical SAN
• Ports allocated within a physical fabric to create
virtual fabrics
• Fabric disruption is limited to VSAN
VSANs provide
• Dynamic provisioning and resizing
• Improved port utilization
• Non-disruptive reassignment
• Shared ISL bandwidth
Cisco MDS VSANs for Virtualization

19. 19© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
VSAN 30 VSAN 31
VSAN 20 VSAN 21
VSAN 10 VSAN 11
Using VSANs to Provide Multi-tenancy
Application
“A”
Application
“B”
Application
“C”

20. 20© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
XtremIO Provisioning removes
steps from the typical process
• Minimum planning
No RAID configuration
Minimal sizing effort for
cloning/snapshots
• No tiering
Single tier, all-flash array
• No performance tuning
Independent of I/O access
pattern, cache hit rates, tiering
decisions, etc.
EMC XtremIO Ease of Management
Step 1:
Create
Volumes
Step 2:
Map
Volumes
Step 3:
Create
Initator
Groups

21. 21© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Create fewer zones at an application
level or physical/cluster level
Cisco MDS 9000 Ease of Management -
Smart Zoning
Smart Zoning:
• Simplicity of multi-member zones
• Internal efficiency of one-to-one
12 x I
2 x T
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
T
I
I
I
Multi-member zones:
• What you want
• What you get

22. 22© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Smart Zoning: Configuration Example
Smart Zoning:
Requires only 1 zone with 12 hosts and 2 X-Brick pwwns.
Zoneset name Smart-VDI vsan 200
zone name x-brick1 vsan 200
pwwn 15:10:10:10:10:10:10:01 initiator
pwwn 15:10:10:10:10:10:10:02 initiator
pwwn 15:10:10:10:10:10:10:03 initiator
pwwn 15:10:10:10:10:10:10:04 initiator
.
.
pwwn 15:10:10:10:10:10:10:12 initiator
pwwn 25:20:20:20:20:20:20:01 target
pwwn 25:20:20:20:20:20:20:02 target
Adding another VDI cluster would require adding the new
X-Brick ports and new hosts to the existing zone or adding
the 2 new X-Brick pwwns to the first zone and creating
one additional zone with all 4 X-Brick ports together with
the new hosts..
Traditional Zoning:
(Requires 24 two-member zones)
Zoneset name VDI vsan 100
zone name host1-x-brick1a vsan 100
pwwn 10:10:10:10:10:10:10:01
pwwn 20:20:20:20:20:20:20:01
zone name host1-x-brick1b vsan 100
pwwn 10:10:10:10:10:10:10:01
pwwn 20:20:20:20:20:20:20:02
zone name host2-x-brick1a vsan 100
pwwn 10:10:10:10:10:10:10:02
pwwn 20:20:20:20:20:20:20:01
zone name host2-x-brick1b vsan 100
pwwn 10:10:10:10:10:10:10:02
pwwn 20:20:20:20:20:20:20:02
.
.
zone name host12-x-brick1a vsan 100
pwwn 10:10:10:10:10:10:10:12
pwwn 20:20:20:20:20:20:20:01
zone name host12-x-brick1b vsan 100
pwwn 10:10:10:10:10:10:10:12
pwwn 20:20:20:20:20:20:20:02
Adding another VDI cluster would require an additional
72 zones to be configured per fabric.

23. 23© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
EMC XtremIO Flash Arrays and Cisco MDS Switches and Directors
• Industry leading technologies and features
• Combined provides a greater solution (1 + 1 = 3)
• Fully Qualified by both EMC and Cisco
Summary

24. Thank you.