Data Center Tour
Dick Corso and Ian Reddy
2004
Cisco IT
Data Center and
Operations Control Center
Tour
Data Center Storage and Servers
Page 1 of 9
Data Center Tour
Dick Corso and Ian Reddy
2004
6. Data Center Storage and Servers
Storage
Storage Area Networks
Figure 1.
Storage Switches in the Data Center
Dick: “This data center is a little bit about everything. We have a lot of storage. Most of
that storage is EMC, and most of the rest is HP. In this data center, and in the other
production data centers around the world, we connect hundreds of hosts to these storage
frames over a storage area network (SAN). This SAN is made up of Cisco MDS
multilayer switches. There’s a great success story about this SAN. It has enabled us to
fully utilize our storage resources. We already have about two Petabytes within Cisco –
that’s more than two quadrillion bytes of data. Two years ago almost all our storage was
directly connected to each host. We might get two or three different hosts connected to
the same frame, and we had almost half of our storage unutilized. In our SAN
environment our storage utilization is a lot higher. When you consider that an EMC
frame might cost up to $750,000, and we have a couple hundred frames, that’s a lot of
money saved.”
Page 2 of 9
Data Center Tour
Dick Corso and Ian Reddy
2004
Figure 2.
Ian with Fibers Connecting Storage Switches
Ian: “These Cisco MDS 9509 storage switches have a lot of ports; they can have more
than 200 each. Already they are almost all used. There are not many empty ports on these
switches. And if you look around the corner, you’ll see why.
“We have a lot of storage in this data center, about 600 terabytes of storage in this room
of the data center, and about 800 terabytes of storage in the whole data center. All these
storage frames are connected to a storage area network using these switches, connecting
our hundreds of production hosts to a large pool of shared storage. This helps keep