Cisco has announced an innovative family of datacenter-class switching platforms, the Cisco Nexus Series, to meet customer demands for next-generation mission-critical datacenters. As the datacenter transitions to a more services-centric model, the network plays a pivotal role in orchestrating virtual IT resources and scaling workloads. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series was designed with this environment in mind, delivering the infrastructure chapter of Cisco's Datacenter 3.0 vision.
The announcement features a new datacenter platform with both hardware and software innovations, including: The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series, the flagship datacenter-class switching platform combining Ethernet, IP, and storage capabilities across one unified network fabric The Cisco Trusted Security (TrustSec) architecture An advanced operating system, the Cisco Nexus Operating System (NX-OS), and the Cisco Datacenter Network Manager The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series is the flagship member of the Cisco Nexus Family, the first in a new datacenter class of switching products.
The Nexus 7000 is a highly scalable modular platform that delivers up to 15 terabits per second of switching capacity in a single chassis, supporting up to 512 10-gigabits-per-second (Gbps) Ethernet and future delivery of 40- and 100-Gbps Ethernet. Its unified fabric architecture combines Ethernet and storage capabilities into a single platform, designed to provide all servers with access to all network and storage resources. This enables datacenter consolidation and virtualization. Key components of the unified fabric architecture include unified I/O interfaces and Fibre Channel over Ethernet support to be delivered in the future.
The Nexus 7000 is designed specifically for the datacenter with improved airflow, integrated cable management, and a resilient platform architecture. The data plane is fully distributed and, when coupled with the Cisco NX-OS operating system, is designed to enable zero service-disruption upgrades on production systems. This provides a seamless systems design that reduces administrative tasks and simplifies complex systems operations.
Building datacenters based on a unified fabric eliminates the need for parallel storage and computational networks, reducing the number of server interfaces and significantly reducing the cabling and switching infrastructure required. A unified fabric also enables customers to move to higher-density server form factors, increasing the IT workload output of each datacenter. Combined with virtualization, this new technology will help customers to build more efficient and sustainable datacenters, maximizing IT workload for each facility and saving more power overall than the network generally consumes. The Nexus 7000 architecture is designed around this lossless unified fabric capable of simultaneously forwarding storage, Ethernet, and IP traffic. The fabric scales performance linearly with each fabric module and is logically partitioned for efficient unicast and multicast traffic, making it ideally suited for market data video as well as collaboration applications.
The Nexus 7000 Series is the first platform to deliver Cisco Trusted Security, a new architecture introduced last month that integrates identity- and role-based security across datacenters. TrustSec enforces trusted traffic segmentation without requiring complex addressing models and unmanageable access control lists. This enables virtual machine mobility throughout the datacenter while helping to ensure data integrity with a wire-rate AES-128 encryption implementation on every port of the Nexus 7000.
Supporting the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series, the Cisco Datacenter Network Manager (DCNM) provides visibility across datacenter networks. Built on the foundation of Cisco Fabric Manager for storage networks, DCNM provides topology discovery and visualization for increased operational efficiency and systems awareness. Nexus 7000 management interfaces are fully compatible with Cisco VFrame Datacenter, an orchestration platform that uses network intelligence to provision resources together as virtualized services. VFrame DC will be a key enabler for services orchestration on the Nexus platform.