This IBM® Redbooks® Product Guide describes the Cisco MDS 9718 Multilayer Director for IBM Storage Networking (9710-E16). The MDS 9718 has the industry's highest port density for a storage area network (SAN) director and features 768 line-rate 32 gigabits per second (Gbps) or 16 Gbps Fibre Channel ports. Designed to support multiprotocol workloads, MDS 9718 enables SAN consolidation and collapsed-core solutions for large enterprises, which reduces the number of managed switches and leads to easy-to-manage deployments. The MDS 9718 supports the 48-Port 32 Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module, the 48-Port 16 Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module, the 48-port 10 Gbps FCoE Switching Module, the 24-port 40 Gbps FCoE switching module, and the 24/10-port SAN Extension Module. By reducing the number of front-panel ports that are used on inter-switch links (ISLs), it also offers room for future growth. MDS 9718 addresses the mounting storage requirements of today's large virtualized data centers. As a director-class SAN switch, MDS 9718 uses the same operating system and management interface as other Cisco data center switches. It brings intelligent capabilities to a high-performance, protocol-independent switch fabric, and delivers uncompromising availability, security, scalability, simplified management, and the flexibility to integrate new technologies. You can use MDS 9718 to transparently deploy unified fabrics with Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connectivity to achieve low total cost of ownership (TCO). For mission-critical enterprise storage networks that require secure, robust, cost-effective business-continuance services, the FCIP extension module is designed to deliver outstanding SAN extension performance, reducing latency for disk and tape operations with FCIP acceleration features, including FCIP write acceleration and FCIP tape write and read acceleration.