Does anyone has any experience with the Cisco MDS line? Currently my san environment is switched via Brocade 4500's but we are making the move from EMC to Hitachi and I figured now would be a good time to investigate the MDS for switching.

What we are looking at is the 9222i or the 9509 (I think that is the right number). Its their chassis level system w/ the mid-range count in slots. We are comparing this to the Brocade Director (65000) and 4900. We will be doing site-to-site replication (asynchronously) in the near future. I figured Cisco @ the edge (CE) would play well w/ the MDS for replication.

Any insight would be awesome (quibbles, complaints, wish I coulds, etc).

Mahalo!

So I take it there is very little experience w/ SAN switching in this group... Bummer... It's pretty cool stuff if you decide to get into it. I find it kind of refreshing to work on SAN stuff when IP get's to be a bit boring...

Oh well...

Im voting Brocade on this one.

The ISP I work for uses a lot of Brocade stuff, primarily the 4100 series I believe. They seem quite a good unit, I cant remember a time at all when weve had a SAN issue caused by a bug, or failure of one of the SAN switches (Ive been at this ISP for about 20 months). That scores well, especially when you are on the (level 2) helpdesk.

If it aint broke, dont fix it I say.

Im not privy to the pricing of the Brocade stuff, but I do believe you have to licence them based on the number of ports you want to use. This may be the deciding factor if you are looking to reduce SAN costs, and the Brocades are more expensive to license than another vendor.

But as I said above, if the Brocades work reliably, why move away. Thats not to say that another vendor wouldnt be as or more reliable. I say that based purely on experience, but with nothing to compare either - Im still voting Brocade though.