Photos: Inside Cisco's European datacentre

Cisco had invited the European press to Amsterdam to see the launch of the company's MDS 9513 storage switch. The company has long targeted the lucrative storage market as a key area for growth and the 9513 certainly has plenty of growth potential.

It is shown here as a two-slot system undergoing testing at Cisco's Amsterdam facility.

Minimally configured in terms of size — as a small rack size it can take up to 192 Fibre Channel ports — the 9513 is flexible and also has hardware encryption compression.

Fully configured, the top-end MDS 9513 switch will carry 528 ports, which can be a mix of 1Gbps, 2Gbps, 4Gbps and 10Gbps Fibre Channel connections.

At the launch on this new switch last Monday, Cisco also announced four new switch modules. Three of the new switching units can have speeds of 1Gbps, 2Gbps or 4Gbps and come with 12, 24 or 48 ports. There is also a top-end unit that comes with four 10Gbps ports.

This top-end switch is aimed at "inter-switch communications, where you are linking together two SANs, and applications across metropolitan switches," according to Dante Malagrino, Cisco's senior manager for data centre systems.