The game of one-upmanship in the storage networking market reached another height today with the introduction of a new director switch from Cisco Systems Inc. that packs what is described as a record-setting 786 ports. The combined bandwidth capacity of the MDS 9781 adds up to some 48 terabits per second, enough for even the most resource-intensive workloads.

Cisco believes that the switch will prove particularly appealing to organizations looking to reduce the amount of space that has to be reserved for networking equipment in their environments. According to a fact sheet distributed to the press, a single MDS 9781 is able to perform the work of up to three competing directors from Broadcom Corp. for a footprint reduction of 75 percent. The large amount of gear packed into the chassis potentially also makes the box a good choice for companies deploying flash arrays, which are often used to support data-intensive applications that move a lot of information to and from storage.

To ensure that traffic is handled smoothly, Cisco has fitted the MDS 9781 with no fewer than six backup power supplies and a variety of other spare components that can quickly come online in the event of a failure. The switch’s reliably-centric design has the added benefit of increasing its longevity, with the vendor claiming that customers may be able to go as long as ten years without making a replacement. But they’ll still need to adapt the box to the changes that are set to take place in their environments during that time span.

First and foremost is the rapid increase in the amount of data entering the corporate network, which Cisco Inc. has addressed with the inclusion of support for high-speed 32G and 40G connections. The MDS 9781 also attempts to accommodate the shift towards programmatic management with a new configuration interface that is touted as nearly ten times faster than the one used in the company’s earlier hardware. The boost should make troubleshooting errors and rolling out changes that much quicker for administrators, while freeing up their time to perform other tasks in the process.

Image via Geralt