Cisco made a number of announcements today surrounding its Unified Data Center Strategy which promotes its open networking fabric for data centers and the Cloud.
The announcements include new high-density 40Gb switches and a network programmable controller and new hybrid cloud functionality.
Cisco said together, these technology developments help scale, extend and open the networking fabric of the data center, cloud and cloud provider environments and bring consistency across physical, virtual and cloud-based deployments.
“They enable enterprise customers to connect to multi-cloud and hybrid environments that expand the potential for their business operations and communications, and enable service provider customers to offer new monetized services while increasing agility and infrastructure optimization,” Cisco said.
Switches
Cisco’s Nexus 6000 switch is the first 96-port, line rate 40Gb fixed form factor switch with Ethernet and Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and 1-microsecond latency across all ports.
Cisco said it can transfer the entire content of the Library of Congress in just 210 seconds.
Cisco also added rich services modules to its Nexus 7000 Series, and 40Gb uplink extensions to its Nexus 5000 and 2000 product lines. With these extensions, Cisco said its Unified Fabric portfolio now delivers an end-to-end 40Gb solution providing design flexibility for virtual and cloud deployments of converged networks with 10G and 40G FCoE support, while enabling greater visibility in the network.
It released two Nexus 6000 models - the Nexus 6004, which it said is the industry's highest density switch with up to 96 ports of line rate 40GE (384 ports of line rate 10GE) in a compact 4 RU (rack unit) form factor; and the Nexus 6001, which offers line rate 48 ports of GE/10GE fixed ports with 4 ports of 40GE (or 16 ports of 10GE) uplinks in 1 RU form factor.
It also released the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Network Analysis Module (NAMK) which brings application awareness and performance analytics to the Cisco Nexus 7000 and the Cisco Nexus 2248PQ fabric extender and Nexus 5500 series switch with 40Gb Ethernet uplink capabilities.
Hybrid cloud
Cisco said it has also solved some of the challenges around security and complexity with hybrid cloud deployments with its new Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch that allows enterprise workloads to be placed in service provider clouds, through a single point of management with a high degree of security.
The Nexus 1000V InterCloud orchestrates hybrid cloud environments by extending corporate enterprise environments into the provider cloud preserving existing networking capabilities and L4-7 services while bringing manageability of the enterprise into the provider cloud.
It said the solution provides choice of provider clouds and operates in a hypervisor-agnostic manner.
New controller
Cisco also introduced a new Cisco ONE Software Controller it said supports a highly available, scalable and extensible architecture.
It said the ONE controller offers the industry's first multiprotocol interfaces with One Platform Kit (onePK) and OpenFlow; consistent management, troubleshooting and security features; and built-in applications that include network slicing functionality for enabling logical partitioning of network resources.
The ONE Controller interacts with Cisco networking applications such as Custom Forwarding and Network Tapping.