Topology Independent; Transport Agnostic; High Availability And Resiliency; Improved Tape Acceleration Performance - Cisco MDS 9000 series Configuration Manual

About Cisco I/O Accelerator
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
the write acceleration and tape acceleration services on the Cisco MDS MSM-18/4 module, SSN-16
module, and 9222i switch as a fabric service. This eliminates the need to buy separate hardware to obtain
Fibre Channel write acceleration and FCIP write acceleration and tape acceleration.

Topology Independent

IOA can be deployed anywhere in the fabric without rewiring the hardware or reconfiguring the fabric.
There are no restrictions on where the hosts and targets are connected to. Both the Fibre Channel and
FCIP write acceleration is supported only on PortChannels but do not support multiple equal-cost links.
FCIP tape acceleration is not supported on PortChannels. IOA eliminates these topological restrictions.

Transport Agnostic

IOA is completely transport-agnostic and is supported on both Fibre Channel and FCIP ISLs between
two sites.

High Availability and Resiliency

IOA equally supports both PortChannels and equal-cost multiple path (ECMP) links across two data
centers. This allows you to seamlessly add ISLs across the two data centers for capacity building or
redundancy. IOA is completely resilient against ISL failures. IOA uses a Lightweight Reliable Transport
Protocol (LRTP) to guard against any ISL failures as long as there is an alternate path available across
the two data centers. Remote replication and tape backup applications are completely unaffected by these
failures.

Improved Tape Acceleration Performance

IOA tape acceleration provides higher throughput numbers than the FCIP tape acceleration, which is
limited by a single Gigabit Ethernet throughput.

Load Balancing

IOA uses clustering technology to provide automatic load balancing and redundancy for traffic flows
across multiple IOA service engines that can be configured for the IOA service. When an IOA service
engine fails, the affected traffic flows are automatically redirected to the available IOA service engines
to resume acceleration.
Cisco MDS 9000 Family I/O Accelerator Configuration Guide
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OL-20708-01, Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.0(1a)
Overview