Overview; About Cisco I/O Accelerator; Unified Acceleration Service - Cisco MDS 9000 series Configuration Manual

S e n d d o c u m e n t a t i o n c o m m e n t s t o m d s f e e d b a c k - d o c @ c i s c o . c o m

Overview

This chapter provides an overview of the Cisco I/O Accelerator feature and includes the following
sections:
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About Cisco I/O Accelerator

The Cisco MDS 9000 Family I/O Accelerator (IOA) feature provides Small Computer System Interface
(SCSI) acceleration in a storage area network (SAN) where the sites are interconnected over long
distances using Fibre Channel or Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) Inter-Switch Links (ISLs).
IOA provides these features, which are described in the following sections:
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Unified Acceleration Service

IOA provides both SCSI write acceleration and tape acceleration features as a unified fabric service.
These services were provided in previous releases in the form of Fibre Channel write acceleration for
remote replication over Fibre Channel links and FCIP write acceleration and tape acceleration over FCIP
links. Fibre Channel write acceleration was offered on the Storage Services Module (SSM) and FCIP
write acceleration and tape acceleration were offered on the IP storage services modules. IOA offers both
OL-20708-01, Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.0(1a)
About Cisco I/O Accelerator, page 1-1
Example IOA Topology, page 1-3
Terminology, page 1-3
Hardware Requirements, page 1-5
Software Requirements, page 1-5
License Requirements, page 1-6
Unified Acceleration Service, page 1-1
Topology Independent, page 1-2
Transport Agnostic, page 1-2
High Availability and Resiliency, page 1-2
Improved Tape Acceleration Performance, page 1-2
Load Balancing, page 1-2
C H A P T E R
Cisco MDS 9000 Family I/O Accelerator Configuration Guide
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