Today Cisco announed the new MDS 9396S. It’s a storage switch. Not a leaf switch for ACI like the Cisco 9396PX/9396TX. So please don’t confuse those type of switches. The MDS is for storage en the Nexus 9396 is for network switching.
The new Cisco MDS 9396S is a 16G fixed storage switch with no oversubscription. It can be used for all kind of business and is very suitable as top of rack or middle of row switch.
Due to the fact that it got 500 buffer credits per port and with an Enterprise license you can get 4096 buffercredits for one port in a 4 port shared group.
You can start with only 48 ports enabled and pay as you grow with only adding licenses to activate all the rest of the ports. This can be done with steps of 12 ports.
Ofcourse it also got some nice features like :
- VSAN
- IVR
- NPV
- PortChannel with multipath load balancing
- Flow-based and zone-based QoS