HPE Storage Director Switch C-series SN8700C

Lower TCO with SAN Consolidation

The HPE Storage Director Switch C-series SN8700C lets you easily consolidate data assets into fewer, larger, and more manageable SANs to reduce your hardware footprint and associated capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX).

It provides up to 48 terabits per second (Tb/s) of FC system bandwidth and 768 (16 slots) or 384 (8 slots) or 192 (4 slots) 16/32/64 Gb/s in a single chassis.

Existing 16/32Gbps customers can transparently move to 32/64Gbps speeds without the need for a major equipment upgrade as the 48-port 32Gbps FC switching module or 48-port 64Gbps FC switching module can be easily inserted into an existing HPE Storage Director Switch C-series SN8700C.

It provides line-rate, nonblocking, and predictable performance for all traffic conditions for every port up to 64Gbps speed in the chassis.

It offers VSAN technology, access control lists (ACLs) for hardware-based intelligent frame processing, and fabric-wide quality of service (QoS) enable migration from SAN islands to enterprise wide storage networks.

High Availability

The HPE Storage Director Switch C-series SN8700C offers fully redundant components, including fabric cards, supervisors, and power supplies.

It provides grid redundancy on the power supply and 1+1 redundant supervisors.

With the HPE Storage Director Switch C-series SN8700C, users can add additional Fabric-3 modules to enable N+1 fabric redundancy with no loss of performance.

The port-channel capability allows you aggregate up to 16 physical links into one logical bundle. The bundle can consist of any speed-matched ports in the chassis, helping ensure that the bundle can remain active in the event of a port or module failure.

It provides outstanding high availability, helping ensure that solutions exceed the maximum uptime requirements of today’s most-demanding environments.

Easy Manageability

The HPE Storage Director Switch C-series SN8700C supports enhanced diagnostic features such as inter-switch link (ISL) and host-bus-adapter (HBA) diagnostics, read diagnostic parameters, link cable beacon, and advanced reliability features such as forward error correction (FEC) with HBA ports.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC), formerly DCNM, provides a centralized management tool with task-based wizards that simplifies management of switches and fabrics. Additional advanced features are available with the Advantage and Premier Subscription licenses, sold separately.

Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) is renamed as Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC) from release 12.0.1a.

Cisco SAN Insights delivers deep visibility into I/O traffic between the compute and the storage infrastructure. This information is in addition to the already-available visibility obtained from individual ports, switches, servers, virtual machines, and storage arrays.

Fully Integrated SAN Analytics (HPE C-series SAN Insights or HPE C-series Premier license)

The HPE Storage Director Switch C-series SN8700C offers state-of-the-art SAN analytics and telemetry capabilities that have been built into this next-generation hardware platform.

It inspects I/O flows to bring out a unified view of the infrastructure irrespective of the architecture or vendor of storage arrays, servers, or operating systems.

The telemetry data extracted from the inspection of the frame headers are calculated on board (within the director module) and, using an industry-leading open format, can be streamed to any analytics-visualization platform.

SAN Analytics can be integrated with and visualized by using the advanced features of Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC).