The Cisco ® MDS 9000 18/4-Port Multiservice Module (MSM) is optimized for deployment of high-performance SAN extension solutions, distributed intelligent fabric services, and cost-effective IP storage and mainframe connectivity in enterprise storage networks.

The Cisco MDS 9000 18/4-Port Multiservice Module is supported in the Cisco MDS 9200 Series Multilayer Switches and MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors and offers 18 1-, 2-, and 4-Gbps Fibre Channel ports and 4 1-Gigabit Ethernet IP storage services ports. It provides multiprotocol capabilities, integrating, in a single-form-factor, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), Cisco Storage Media Encryption (SME), Cisco MDS 9000 I/O Accelerator (IOA), Cisco Storage Services Enabler (SSE), Small Computer System Interface over IP (iSCSI), IBM Fibre Connection (FICON), FICON Control Unit Port (CUP) management, Cisco MDS 9000 Extended Remote Copy (XRC) Acceleration, and switch cascading.

The Cisco MDS 9000 18/4-Port Multiservice Module uses Cisco expertise and knowledge of IP networks to deliver outstanding SAN extension performance, reducing latency for disk and tape with FCIP acceleration features, including FCIP write acceleration and FCIP tape write and read acceleration. Comparable features are available for the IBM System z FICON over FCIP environment: XRC Acceleration for z/OS Global Mirror and FICON tape write and read acceleration. Hardware-based encryption helps secure sensitive traffic with IP Security (IPsec), and hardware-based compression dramatically enhances performance for both high- and low-speed links, enabling immediate cost savings in expensive WAN infrastructure.

Natively integrating support for intelligent fabric applications, the Cisco MDS 9000 18/4-Port Multiservice Module provides a platform for distributed fabric services such as:

- Cisco SME, which encrypts data at rest on heterogeneous disk arrays, tape drives, and virtual tape libraries (VTLs)
- Cisco Data Mobility Manager (DMM), which enables data migration between heterogeneous targets
- Cisco IOA feature, which provides SCSI acceleration to dramatically increase the number of SCSI I/O operations per second over long distances spanned by Fibre Channel and FCIP links by reducing the effect of transport latency on the processing of each operation

The Cisco MDS 9000 18/4-Port Multiservice Module transparently offers such advanced functions to any device connected to the fabric, facilitating ease of deployment, scalability, and high availability through clustering.