Brazil designed a large-scale SAN for Reliant Energy, a power company based in Houston, which has purchased and deployed several Cisco MDS 9509s and was one of the earliest beta sites for the MDS 9000 switches (see Cisco Beta Site: 'We Love It!').
But Ron Totah, technical marketing manager at Brocade, says that Cisco's oversubscribed 32-port card is suitable only for a customer's lowest-end servers that won't need the full bandwidth of a 2-Gbit/s FC connection. "If you connect high-speed servers to it, you may have to keep some ports unpopulated to sustain performance," he says.
He also points out that the 32-port blade is clearly not intended for handling interswitch links (ISLs): According to Cisco's own documentation, forcing an E-port on the 32-port card disables the other three ports in a four-port group.
"The point is that they're out marketing this as a 224-port switch, but you wouldn't configure it like that in the real world," says Totah.
Cisco concedes that a 224-port MDS 9509 isn't the optimal configuration for a director. However, it says a 192-port system -- with two 16-port line cards and five 32-port modules -- provides excellent overall performance as a core switch.
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