A handful of high-profile networking vendors are digging their heels deeper into the data center, a market that offers solution providers a crack at the $14 billion in hardware and services opportunity the data center is expected to offer over the next few years. Traditional networking vendors like Cisco Systems, ProCurve Networking by HP and Juniper Networks are targeting the data center now more than ever before, promising to ease virtualization and consolidation efforts. Here's a roundup of key data center networking solutions recently added to networking vendors' product lineups.



Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switch



The first data center networking switch to come out of Cisco's Data Center 3.0 vision was the Nexus 7000 series. Debuting in January of 2008, the Nexus 7000 Switch is designed for 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks and is built to handle the needs of a data center on a day-to-day basis.





Currently, the Nexus 7000 Series, which runs Cisco's NX-OS data center operating system, can scale beyond 15 Tb per second with capabilities to handle 40 Gb and 100 Gb Ethernet and unified fabric input/output modules. Cisco has said the Nexus 7000 can perform fast enough to download 90,000 Netflix movies in less than 39 seconds or send a high-resolution, two-megapixel photo to everyone on Earth in 28 minutes. Cisco also says the Nexus 7000 can cut power consumption in the data center by around 8 percent.