The Cisco^®MDS 9706 Multilayer Director is a director-class SAN switch designed for deployment in small to medium-sized storage networks to support enterprise clouds and business transformation. It layers a comprehensive set of intelligent features onto a high-performance protocol-independent switch fabric.

The MDS 9706 addresses the stringent requirements of large virtualized data center storage environments. Itdelivers uncompromising availability security scalability ease of management and transparent integration of new technologiesfor extremely flexible data center SAN solutions. It shares the same operating system and management interface with other Cisco data center switches. The MDS 9706 lets you transparently deploy unified fabrics with Fibre Channel IBM Fibre Connection (FICON) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connectivity with a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).