Cisco MDS 9513 (DS-C9513) Full Product Description

1. Short Sales Title

2. Official Product Overview & Lifecycle

Core Hardware Differentiators vs MDS 9506 / MDS 9509

1. Unique external dual crossbar fabric architecture (MDS 9506/9509 use integrated crossbar built into supervisors only): Two independent hot-swappable rear crossbar modules deliver full 8.4 Tbps non-blocking backplane bandwidth; single crossbar failure maintains full chassis throughput without performance degradationCisco.
2. Maximum scalable front slot count: 11 universal hot-swappable line/service module slots (MDS 9509 only 7 line card slots, MDS 9506 only 4), supporting up to 528×8G FC ports fully populated with eleven 48-port DS-X9248-256 8G line cards, industry-leading single-chassis port density for its generation.
3. Dual independent cooling subsystems: Front 15-fan main fan tray + separate rear crossbar cooling fan tray (MDS 9506/9509 only single front fan tray without dedicated crossbar cooling), superior thermal dissipation for full high-density module loading and long-duration 8G SFP operation.
4. Dual redundant Supervisor-2 / Supervisor-2A fabric control modules with doubled memory (2GB RAM on Supervisor-2A) and FCoE forward compatibility, stateful failover, non-disruptive ISSU firmware upgrades; fixed-port MDS switches have single non-replaceable integrated supervisor without fabric redundancyHewle....
5. Dual redundant hot-swappable clock modules at rear midplane (exclusive to MDS 9513) to eliminate clock single point of failure, unavailable on smaller MDS 9506/9509 chassis.
6. Universal module compatibility: Supports full MDS 9000 Gen1/Gen2 portfolio – high-density FC switching cards, MPS multi-protocol gateway modules (2×1G GE for FCIP/iSCSI WAN SAN extension), SSM storage encryption/asynchronous replication service modules, 10G FC long-distance ISL trunk modules, FCoE-capable line cards for converged LAN/SAN workloads.
7. Full native FICON mainframe hardware acceleration for IBM enterprise tape/disk consolidation, a specialized feature unavailable on base fixed MDS switches.
8. Heavy-duty 6000W dual redundant AC/DC power supplies (MDS 9506/9509 only 1900W PSUs insufficient for full 11-slot high-density module power draw).
9. Unified spare part commonality with MDS 9506 / MDS 9509 directors (supervisors, line cards, service modules interchangeable) to reduce enterprise maintenance inventory costs.

Core High-Availability Design

Model Suffix Breakdown

• DS-C: Cisco MDS storage director bare chassis part number prefix
• 9513: MDS 9500 flagship large modular director series, total 13 front slots (11 line/service card slots + 2 dedicated supervisor/fabric slots) plus rear crossbar/clock/power/fan subsystems
• No K9 suffix on empty bare metal chassis DS-C9513; complete bundled SKUs like DS-C9513-2K9 include dual Sup-2 + dual AC power supplies + full enterprise feature license

3. Chassis Slot & Hardware Layout Definition

Front Panel 13 Horizontal Slots (19-inch rack, 18RU height)

1. Slots 1,2,3,4,5,6,9,10,11,12,13: 11 universal hot-swappable line/service module slots (FC switching cards / MPS multi-protocol IP gateway / SSM storage service modules / 10G ISL trunk modules)
2. Slots 7, 8: Dedicated redundant supervisor/fabric control module slots (only Supervisor-2 / Supervisor-2A supported; Slot7 default active, Slot8 standby)
3. Front Left Fan Tray: Single integrated hot-swappable multi-fan tray with 15 variable-speed cooling fans for front line card airflow

Rear Panel Redundant Subsystems

1. Two independent hot-swappable crossbar switching fabric modules (active-active load-sharing, mandatory for full 8.4Tbps bandwidth)
2. Separate dedicated rear crossbar fan tray for crossbar module cooling
3. Two independent hot-swappable clock distribution modules (dual redundant timing reference)
4. Two independent hot-swappable power supply bays supporting AC or DC high-voltage power modules

Out-of-Band Management Interfaces (each supervisor module carries full management ports)

• RJ45 RS232 serial console port for local CLI access
• Legacy DB-9 industrial COM terminal port
• Isolated 10/100BASE-T out-of-band Ethernet management port for remote SSH/Telnet/SNMP administration
• Onboard compact flash storage partition for SAN-OS/NX-OS firmware images and running configuration archives

Front Global Diagnostic LED Bank

Airflow Specification

Supported Transceivers & Pluggable Modules

1. Fibre Channel SFP transceivers (sold separately for all line card FC ports):
   • DS-SFP-FC2G-SW: 2Gbps short-wave multimode, 500m reach
   • DS-SFP-FC4G-SW: 4Gbps short-wave multimode, 500m reach
   • DS-SFP-FC8G-SW: 8Gbps short-wave multimode, 500m reach
   • DS-SFP-FC8G-LW: 8Gbps long-wave single-mode, 10km reach
   • Backward compatible with legacy 1G FC SFPs for existing storage array interoperation
2. Supported pluggable line/service modules for Slots 1–6,9–13:
   • DS-X9216: 16×4G FC switching module
   • DS-X9224: 24×4G FC switching module
   • DS-X9248-256: 48×8G FC maximum-density line card (11×48 = 528 total FC ports full chassis)
   • MPS-14/2 Multiprotocol Services Module: 14×FC SFP ports + 2×1G copper GE ports for iSCSI / FCIP gateway
   • SSM Storage Services Module: Inline tape encryption, asynchronous cross-fabric replication, SAN performance analytics
   • DS-X9304: 4×10G FC X2 module for high-speed long-distance ISL trunk links
3. Supervisor module compatibility: Supervisor-2 Gen2 fabric module, Supervisor-2A upgraded fabric module (2GB RAM, FCoE support)
4. Crossbar module compatibility: MDS 9513 Crossbar Fabric Module 2 (external dedicated crossbar required, incompatible with MDS 9506/9509 integrated crossbar supervisors)
5. Power supply compatibility: 6000W AC PEM modules (DS-PWR-6000AC), 6000W DC PEM telecom modules (DS-PWR-6000DC), non-interchangeable between AC/HV chassis variants

4. Hardware & Physical Specifications

Core SAN Switching & Routing Performance

• Single-chassis non-blocking fabric maximum aggregate bandwidth: 8.4 Tbps full-duplex (dual active-active crossbar modules)Cisco
• Wire-speed frame forwarding rate: Up to 8400 Mpps Fibre Channel frame switching at full 8G line rate per port
• Low-latency virtual output queuing (VOQ) shared packet buffer pool with configurable buffer credit allocation for long-distance ISL trunk links
• FC N_Port address table capacity: 1,048,576 unique host identifiers, optimized for dense blade server rack deployments
• Maximum isolated VSAN virtual fabrics: 4094
• Maximum active zone sets: 256 zone sets, up to 2000 individual zone entries per VSAN
• Jumbo FC frame MTU support: Up to 9000 bytes
• Supported FC port operating modes: F (Fabric host), FL (Arbitrated Loop), TL (Extended Loop), E (ISL inter-switch trunk), TE (Extended ISL), NP (NPV edge host aggregation)
• Link aggregation: PortChannel multi-port FC ISL trunk bundling, maximum 16 FC ports per logical bundle with dynamic load balancing
• NPV/NPIV native hardware acceleration: Consolidate thousands of server host ports upstream to MDS core directors without core fabric control-plane overhead
• Native multi-protocol ASIC hardware offload: Full FICON tape/disk processing, FCIP tunnel compression, write acceleration, tape pipelining for cross-site disaster recovery replication, FCoE lossless forwarding (Supervisor-2A only)

Power & Cooling System

• Power supply bays: 2 hot-swappable redundant slots, each 6000W AC PSU fully powers complete chassis independently (1+1 N+1 failover protection)
• AC input voltage range: 100–240V AC (10% tolerance), 50/60Hz universal auto-ranging alternating current
• Fan subsystems: Dual independent hot-swappable fan assemblies
  1. Front main fan tray: 15 variable-speed fans for front line card cooling
  2. Rear crossbar fan tray: Dedicated variable-speed fans for rear crossbar module cooling
• Minimum functional fan requirement: At least one full fan tray operational to avoid thermal shutdown; single fan tray failure triggers SNMP fault alert
• Real-time telemetry monitoring: Fan rotational speed, internal chassis ambient temperature, PSU input/output voltage, SFP optical transmit power, port error counters and module fault logging via console syslog and SNMP v1/v2c/v3 traps; critical thermal alarm threshold at 55°C
• Typical full-load power draw: 780W fully populated with eleven 48-port 8G line cards + dual supervisor modules + dual crossbar modules under maximum storage traffic load
• MTBF: 240,000 hours under standard enterprise data center operating conditions

Physical & Environmental Parameters

• Rack form factor: 18 RU standard 19-inch horizontal rack mount
• Dimensions (H × W × D): 22.86 cm × 44.45 cm × 60.96 cm (18 rack units, 17.5 × 24 inch depth; extended depth 73.66cm with cable management guide installed)
• Bare chassis weight: 21.8 kg (48 lbs) without power supplies/fan trays/line/crossbar modules; fully loaded maximum weight 36.3 kg (80 lbs) with dual PSUs, dual fan trays, dual crossbar modules and eleven 48-port line cards installed
• Operating ambient temperature range: 0°C to 40°C (32°F–104°F); certified altitude up to 2000 meters
• Storage temperature range: -40°C to 70°C (-40°F–158°F)
• Relative humidity: 10%–90% non-condensing operating; 5%–95% non-condensing storage
• Compliance Certifications: FCC Class A, UL 60950-1, CE, VCCI Class A, NEBS Level 3, RoHS compliant per regional environmental regulations

Control Plane Out-of-Band Management Interfaces

• Dual local CLI access per supervisor: RJ45 RS232 serial port + legacy DB-9 COM terminal port
• Dedicated isolated 10/100BASE-T out-of-band Ethernet management port per supervisor
• Onboard flash storage for offline SAN-OS/NX-OS firmware and configuration archives
• Front panel multi-status LED bank providing real-time hardware health visualization

5. Full SAN-OS / NX-OS Multilayer Feature Set (SAN-OS 3.x / NX-OS 5.x / 6.x)

Layer 2 Fibre Channel Fabric Services

• VSAN Virtual Storage Area Network: Logical fabric segmentation for multi-application / multi-tenant storage environment isolation
• Dual zoning models: Hard port zoning and soft WWN Smart Zoning for granular host-storage access control
• Complete FICON protocol stack support for IBM mainframe disk and tape enterprise storage connectivity
• Inter-Switch Link (ISL) trunk PortChannel load balancing across mixed 2G/4G/8G FC port speeds (max 16-port bundles)
• DTP Fibre Channel trunk negotiation protocol, FSPF dynamic fabric domain ID routing
• Local SPAN, RSPAN, ESPAN enhanced remote SAN traffic mirroring for multi-session performance troubleshooting
• Per-port broadcast/multicast storm suppression to eliminate fabric-wide RSCN broadcast outages
• NPV N_Port Virtualizer edge switch mode for large-scale core-edge enterprise SAN architecture deployment
• Slow drain detection and congestion isolation hardware feature to mitigate buffer credit starvation
• POAP Power On Auto Provisioning zero-touch switch deployment for mass access rack rollouts
• FCoE lossless Ethernet convergence (Supervisor-2A required) with PFC, DCBX, VNTag virtual machine storage I/O tracking

Multilayer Storage Routing & Multi-Protocol Features

• FSPF Fibre Channel Shortest Path First dynamic fabric routing for multi-switch distributed SAN topologies
• PIM-SM IP multicast for cross-fabric asynchronous synchronous backup replication traffic
• Static FC route configuration for controlled inter-VSAN storage data movement
• Licensed IVR Inter-VSAN Routing feature for secure data transfer between isolated VSAN fabrics
• FCIP + iSCSI multi-protocol gateway processing via MPS service modules for IP WAN cross-site SAN extension
• FCIP tunnel hardware acceleration: lossless compression, write acceleration, tape pipelining for long-distance disaster recovery replication

Advanced SAN QoS & Traffic Prioritization

• Four hardware priority queues per Fibre Channel port for tiered classification of storage I/O traffic
• Ingress frame policing and egress bandwidth shaping to throttle low-priority tape backup and replication streams
• Pre-built QoS templates for production OLTP database workloads, all-flash NVMe storage, tape backup archives, and disaster recovery replication
• Dedicated high-priority traffic queue for low-latency virtual machine and enterprise database I/O workloads
• Medianet media optimization for enterprise video and telepresence storage workflows

Enterprise & Service Provider SAN Security Suite

• Port security: Static WWN locking to block unauthorized physical server/storage device attachment
• RBAC Role-Based Access Control granular CLI user privilege partitioning, integrated with Cisco ISE
• SSHv2 encrypted remote CLI management, SNMPv3 secure monitoring, AES encrypted startup configuration files
• DH-CHAP mutual bidirectional authentication for ISL inter-switch link fabric authentication
• Port lockdown, VSAN read-only access permissions, complete audit logging for all fabric configuration changes
• FIPS 140-2 validated security compliance for government and financial regulated environments
• Cisco TrustSec security group tagging for end-to-end policy segmentation across campus and data center domains
• IPv6 over Fibre Channel support for modern dual-stack management networks
• Secure Boot and anti-counterfeit hardware validation to prevent unauthorized firmware tampering

Monitoring & SAN Management Tools

• Cisco Fabric Manager / DCNM-SAN centralized graphical SAN fabric monitoring, provisioning and REST API automation
• Isolated out-of-band Ethernet management port for offline device access during fabric-wide outages and analytics export
• External USB flash storage for offline NX-OS/SAN-OS firmware image upgrades, running configuration backup archives and syslog export
• Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) automatic MDS fabric neighbor device discovery
• Real-time storage telemetry: Port throughput, latency, frame error counters, SFP optical transmit power diagnostics
• Event notification via email, syslog and SNMP traps for real-time fabric fault alerting
• GOLD Generic Online Diagnostics continuous hardware health validation without traffic interruption
• Onboard Python interpreter + NX-API REST interfaces for custom SAN automation scripts

6. High Availability Capabilities (Core Differentiators vs MDS 9509-K9 8G Model)

1. Dual independent external crossbar fabric modules (active-active load-sharing, MDS 9509 only integrated single crossbar on supervisors) delivering full 8.4Tbps non-blocking bandwidth
2. 11 universal line card expansion slots vs only seven on MDS 9509, supporting up to 528 total 8G FC ports (nearly double MDS 9509’s 336-port ceiling)
3. Dual redundant hot-swappable clock modules (unique to MDS 9513) eliminating timing single point of failure
4. Dual separate front + rear hot-swappable fan trays for layered redundant cooling (MDS 9509 only single front fan tray without dedicated crossbar cooling)
5. Dual hot-swappable high-capacity 6000W AC redundant power supplies (MDS 9509 only 1900W PSUs insufficient for full 11-slot high-density module power draw)
6. Full OIR hot-swap support for all critical FRUs: crossbar modules, clock modules, fan trays, supervisors, line cards, power supplies without chassis power cycle
7. Dual Supervisor-2A upgrade option with doubled memory and native FCoE convergence hardware offload
8. Unified spare part inventory shared with MDS 9506/9509 directors to reduce enterprise maintenance costs
9. VSAN fabric isolation limits fault domains to single virtual storage segment, preventing fabric-wide RSCN broadcast storms
10. Limitation: Legacy 8G Fibre Channel generation hardware only, no native 16G/32G/64G FC support, fixed front-to-back single-direction airflow, legacy SAN-OS/NX-OS firmware stack lacking modern EVPN-FC, containerized automation and cloud-native features, end-of-support since October 31, 2021.

7. Typical Deployment Scenarios

1. Hyperscale Virtualized Data Center Core SAN Director
   18RU modular rack form factor deployed as campus central SAN core director; eleven 48-port 8G line cards populate all line card slots for 528 total FC ports connecting distributed building MDS 92xx edge switches, primary production all-flash NVMe storage arrays and massive blade server racks, dual redundant supervisors + dual active-active crossbar modules provide zero-failover fabric control-plane and switching redundancy, VSAN segmentation isolates independent departmental production, test and backup storage fabrics for thousands of virtual machines.
2. Large Multi-Building Enterprise Campus Core-Edge SAN Fabric
   Multiple DS-C9513 flagship directors deployed per data center storage rack, utilizing mixed 4G/8G FC long-distance LW ISL trunk links to interconnect geographically distributed campus storage pods, dual crossbar fabric ensures zero throughput loss during crossbar module maintenance, built-in FCIP gateway modules provision asynchronous cross-site disaster recovery replication tunnels between primary and DR data centers.
3. Large Regional Mission-Critical Headquarters SAN
   Financial, healthcare and government headquarters storage deployments require complete dual power + dual fan tray + dual supervisor + dual crossbar hardware redundancy to avoid site-wide catastrophic database and tape backup storage outages; integrated FICON mainframe support enables long-distance cross-site DR replication, while MPLS multi-tenant VSAN isolation features support mixed enterprise and agency storage workloads in a single space-efficient flagship chassis.
4. Medium-to-Large Service Provider Multi-Tenant PoP Edge Storage Gateway
   Native full MPLS/VPLS/EVPN carrier-grade feature set and massive FC address table scale make DS-C9513 ideal for carrier PoP edge deployments, terminating hundreds of 8G enterprise customer access circuits and high-speed multi-port ISL core backbone trunks with logical VSAN multi-tenant isolation to separate independent customer storage fabrics, unused line card slots reserved for future growth in customer port count and encryption compliance service modules.
5. Legacy MDS 9506 / MDS 9509 SAN Hardware Refresh Migration Upgrade
   Drop-in performance upgrade for smaller MDS modular directors, fully backward compatible with existing 2G/4G Fibre Channel SFP transceivers while unlocking ultra-high 528-port density, dual redundant external crossbar fabric, dual clock redundancy, layered dual cooling subsystems and modern NX-OS automation workflows.
6. Hyperscale Centralized Enterprise Tape Library Backup Fabric Core
   Deployed as dedicated backup SAN aggregation core director, utilizing multi-port FCIP PortChannel trunk links to primary production SAN fabrics via asynchronous off-site tape archive and disaster recovery replication workloads, with unused line card slots available for high-density host port expansion or SSM encryption/replication compliance service module additions as enterprise storage capacity expands.

8. Standard Package Contents (Bare Chassis DS-C9513 Base SKU)

Items Sold Separately (Not Included in Bare Chassis DS-C9513)

• Dual 6000W AC hot-swappable redundant power supply units (DC telecom PSUs sold separately)
• Dual matching hot-swappable variable-speed fan assemblies (front main fan tray + rear crossbar fan tray)
• Two redundant Supervisor-2 or Supervisor-2A fabric control modules (mandatory for chassis operation)
• Two dedicated MDS 9513 external crossbar switching fabric modules (mandatory for full bandwidth operation)
• Dual redundant hot-swappable clock distribution modules
• Optional MDS 9000 family pluggable line/service modules (48-port 8G FC switching module, MPS-14/2 multi-protocol FCIP/iSCSI gateway module, SSM storage encryption/replication module, 4-port 10G ISL trunk module)
• DS-SFP-FC2G-SW / DS-SFP-FC4G-SW / DS-SFP-FC8G-SW / DS-SFP-FC8G-LW Fibre Channel SFP optical transceivers for all line card FC ports (backward compatible with 1G FC SFPs)
• Optional IVR Inter-VSAN Routing multilayer software license, FCIP SAN Extension Enabler license, Mainframe FICON Enabler license, IOA I/O Acceleration license, DMM Data Migration Enabler license
• RS232 serial console rollover cable, mini USB console cable
• USB flash memory sticks for NX-OS/SAN-OS image and configuration storage
• Fibre channel patch cords, copper Ethernet patch cords, cable management accessories, rack cable guides

Short Commercial Catalog Version (For Quotation & Datasheet Use)