Make optimal use of valuable data center floor space with its compact design standing at 15.6 inches tall (9RU) and allowing up to four SAN192C-6 directors per standard 7-foot rack (42RU). A smaller footprint makes it an excellent candidate for deployment in smaller storage networks as well as pod-based converged data center infrastructure solutions for the cloud.

Maintain high availability and meet the requirements of non-disruptive software upgrades and redundancy of all critical hardware components. The SAN192C-6 software architecture provides redundancy on all major hardware components, including the supervisor and fabric modules as well as the power supplies to help enhance availability. 

Deploy enterprise cloud environments providing elastic computing and network capabilities, enabling IT to scale resources up or down as needed in a quick and cost-efficient manner. The SAN192C-6 provides one of the industry's leading scalability and features for certain enterprise cloud deployments, including pay-as-you-grow flexibility to meet the scalability needs in the cloud.

Leverage support for the FICON protocol in both cascaded and non-cascaded fabrics, as well as an intermix of FICON and open-systems Fibre Channel Protocol traffic on the same switch. The IBM control unit port (CUP) support enables in-band management of SAN c-type Family switches from mainframe management applications and supports a fabric-binding feature that allows inter-switch links (ISLs) to enabled only between specified switches in the fabric-binding configuration.

Use an extensive security framework to protect highly sensitive data crossing today’s enterprise storage networks. It employs intelligent packet inspection at the port level, including the application of access control lists (ACLs) for hardware enforcement of zones, VSANs and advanced port-security features. It also uses Fibre Channel Security Protocol (FC-SP) and Cisco TrustSec Fibre Channel link encryption mechanisms to provide comprehensive security for storage networks.