Cisco Systems has rolled out three new members of its Nexus family for deployment in next-generation data centers. The Nexus 7018 and Nexus 5010 switches — together with Cisco’s Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender — promise to enable IT departments to accommodate changes such as virtualization, Web 2.0 applications, and cloud computing.
The latest Nexus technology supports virtualization in the data-center infrastructure, said Ed Bugnion, CTO of Cisco’s server and virtualization unit. “Today, the architectural shift in the data center marks an IT market transition that will drive the benefits of virtualization to an entirely new level,” Bugnion said.
‘Not Done Yet’
Cisco’s Nexus family can transform data centers into a unified infrastructure that reduces the number of adapters, cuts costs, lowers power consumption, and reduces the carbon footprint. Launched in January 2008, Cisco’s Nexus 7000 series introduced support for end-to-end data-center connectivity by consolidating IP, storage and interprocess communication networks onto a single Ethernet fabric.
In the past year, Cisco has continued to flesh out the Nexus portfolio, established NX-OS as the company’s pervasive data-center OS, and implemented several key technologies, including VN-Link, Data Center Ethernet, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), said Omar Sultan, Cisco’s solution manager for data-center switching. “But we are not done yet,” he said.
Cisco has just introduced the Nexus 7018 — a modular switch that the company reports is capable of delivering continuous system operation and virtualized, pervasive services. Designed to meet the demands of even the largest data centers, the Nexus 7018 features an 18-slot chassis that provides up to 16 I/O module slots, Sultan said.
“For those of you wondering, that gives you 768 ports of Gigabit Ethernet or 512 ports of 10-Gigabit Ethernet in a physical chassis that can still be segmented into up to four virtual switches,” Sultan said. “We have also added…