Cisco Continues Data Center Vision With New Switch, Updates

The Nexus 7000 Series takes queues from the various demands on next-generation data centers, introducing virtualization and keeping an eye toward going green. The switching platform combines Ethernet, IP and storage across one unified network fabric.

Doug Gourlay, Cisco's director of data center solutions, said 33 percent of Cisco's business is in the data center. The release of Nexus 7000 creates several opportunities for resellers who sell into that space as their customers consolidate disparate parallel networks and the data center together. Gourlay said Nexus 7000 gives VARs the opportunity to capture that market transition and capitalize on the fundamental change to Ethernet.

"The data center is the heart of enterprise IT," he said. "It's the last thing [a reseller's] customers are likely to stop investing in."

Gourlay said along with the Nexus 7000 Series, which will be Cisco's flagship data center-class switching platform and be available in10-slot and 18-slot form factors, the San Jose, Calif.-based vendor also released the data center operating system, the Cisco Nexus Operating System (NX-OS) and the Cisco Data Center Networking Manager.

According to Gourlay, the Nexus 7000 is the first in a line of data center switching solutions. He said the Nexus 7000 is a highly scalable modular platform that offers 15 terabits per second of switching capacity in a single chassis, supports up to 512 10 Gbps Ethernet and in the future will deliver 40 and 100 Gbps Ethernet. Cisco said Nexus 7000 performs fast enough to download 90,000 Netflix movies in just less than 39 seconds or send a high-resolution two megapixel photo to everyone on earth in 28 minutes.

Nexus 7000, Gourlay said, also cuts power consumption in the data center by around 8 percent, fueling the shift to green IT, an area that has become a concern for companies and resellers alike. That power savings could ultimately save $20 million over the life of the data center.

The architecture is a unified fabric which combines Ethernet and storage capabilities in one platform, designed to give all servers access to all network and storage resources, opening the doors for data center consolidation and virtualization. In the future the fabric will include unified I/O interfaces and Fibre Channel over Ethernet. Creating data centers based on a unified fabric eliminates the need for parallel storage and computational networks, reducing the overall number of server interfaces and significantly reducing the cabling and switching infrastructure required. A unified fabric also lets users move to higher-density server form factors.

Add in virtualization, and resellers will be able to offer more efficient and sustainable data centers. The Nexus 7000 architecture is built around the lossless unified fabric that can simultaneously forward storage, Ethernet and IP traffic. The fabric scales linearly with each fabric module and is logically partitioned for efficient unicast and multicast traffic, making it suited for video as well as collaboration applications.

Gourlay said the Nexus 7000 is designed with improved airflow, integrated cable management and a resilient platform architecture. The data plane is fully distributed and, when coupled with the NX-OS, it can enable zero service disruption during upgrades on production systems.

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