Part of the Cisco MDS 9500 Series, the Cisco MDS 9506 Multilayer Director elevates the standard for director-class switches. Providing industry-leading availability, scalability, security, and management, the Cisco MDS 9506 allows you to deploy high performance storage-area networks with lowest total cost of ownership. Layering a rich set of intelligent features onto a high performance, protocol agnostic switch fabric, the Cisco MDS 9506 Multilayer Directors addresses the stringent requirements of large data center storage environments: uncompromising high availability, security, scalability, ease of management, and seamless integration of new technologies.The Cisco MDS 9506 Multilayer Director was designed from the ground up for high availability. Beyond meeting the basic requirements of non-disruptive software upgrades and redundancy of all critical hardware components, the Cisco MDS 9506 software architecture offers an unparalleled level of availability. The Cisco MDS 9500 Supervisor Module has the unique ability to automatically restart failed processes, making it exceptionally robust. In the rare event that a Supervisor Module is reset, complete synchronization between the active and standby Supervisor Modules ensures stateful failover with no disruption to traffic.