Many IT departments have consolidated their data centers and SANs, achieving great efficiencies along the way. Large enterprises with consolidated SANs have hundreds or thousands of servers running business applications interconnecting through a common network fabric, making the network fabric an ideal nexus from which to deploy solutions such as SAN extension, acceleration, and encryption of data. The Cisco MDS 9000 16-Port Storage Services Node provides a high-performance, flexible, unified platform for deploying enterprise-class disaster recovery, business continuance, and intelligent fabric applications.