How Cisco Multilayer Director Switch Operates With Other SAN Switches During SAN Migration

Cisco Systems IT has long been a proponent of Storage Area Networks (SANs) over the less efficient and more complex Direct-Attached Storage (DAS)-based networks. The majority of early Cisco SAN efforts used the McDATA Enterprise Director 6064 switch at the core and McDATA Sphereon 3032 switches at the edge. This case study describes how Cisco IT replaced the McDATA switches with Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Director switches, which offer better scalability, higher performance, and Virtual SAN (VSAN) capabilities.