WHITE PAPER
CISCO SYSTEMS SAN CONSOLIDATION COST REDUCTIONS
BASELINES AND RESULTS
Between January 2003 and January 2004, Cisco Systems® deployed 25 Cisco® MDS 9000 multilayer director switches in five
production data centers (two in San Jose, California, two in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and one in Amsterdam,
Netherlands), displacing the traditional storage networking infrastructure. The largest internal storage-area network (SAN)
deployment in the company’s history, the Cisco MDS 9000 rollout was the first significant installation of the (then) new
Cisco storage networking switches.
Today, almost three years later, the Cisco enterprise SAN serves nearly 2 petabytes of raw networked storage and, with nearly 10,000 ports
interconnected across North America, Europe, and the Middle East, is possibly the largest SAN in the world.
This white paper defines and examines the types of cost reductions and cost avoidances associated with the initial Cisco MDS 9000 SAN
deployment and subsequent consolidation efforts. It provides an analytical reference to chronicle the financial impact of investment in both SAN
technology and storage strategies to manage costs. Appendixes A through F give calculations and other supportive information for examples given in
this paper.
EXPLOSIVE GROWTH
The primary business variable that accelerated the migration to consolidated data center SANs was the growth in data storage, with the average total
growth rate for storage between fiscal years 2000 and 2002 reaching 57 percent—and some environments growing 100 percent or more each year.
Direct-attached storage (DAS), long well-known for its inflexibility and inability to scale to meet enterprise needs, had crossed the 500-terabyte (TB)
watermark at Cisco, and cumulative storage use was 20 percent.* Fixed Fibre Channel switches were seen as a temporary solution to meet the
demand for increased port count. As more and more fixed Brocade and McData switches were deployed, however, it became clear that managin