On Wednesday, at its Cisco Live! conference in Las Vegas, Cisco announced a series of new products and services to support the Data Center 3.0 strategy. At the center of 3.0 is a virtualized data center, relying on the company's "unified fabric" approach and delivering services in a cloud-like manner.

To that end, the company unveiled new technology called FabricPath, a new line card, new WAN optimization solutions, a next Nexus 4900 series switch and new professional services geared toward setting up cloud-based systems.

FabricPath is a new software capability of Cisco's NX-OS operating system. The first platform to deploy this capability will be Nexus 7000-series switches, said Shashi Kiran, senior manager for Cisco's data center marketing team.

According to Kiran, FabricPath will reduce the amount of devices in a data center network, while enabling performance improvements. "Because it reduces the number of hops in your topology, you get lower latency."

The technology allows data center network design to move away from a hierarchical spanning-tree-based one to a flatter and simpler configuration. "You're now able to build much larger Layer 2 topologies," Kiran said. "Today, the size of your Layer 2 topology is constrained by the scalability of the spanning tree."

Because those constraints are no longer there, it is possible to engineer a very large subnet, which makes it easy to scale an application with a large pool of compute power available without the need for re-cabling.

A traditional spanning-tree network connecting 2,048 servers used 64 access switches in an example used by Cisco. A network based on FabricPath connects the same amount of servers with only eight switches.

Omar Sultan, senior manager for Cisco's data center team, said FabricPath allows networks to take advantage of desired characteristics of two network layers. Layer 2 positives are simple configuration, flexible provisioning and lower cost of ownership. Layer 3 benefits are having all links active, quick convergence and high scalability.

New hardware that enables FabricPath is the new F-Series line card for Nexus 7000 switches. The high-performance module is scalable to 512 ports per system, offering up to 320 Gbps with port-to-port latency of five micro seconds. It also offers better energy efficiency than its predecessors, taking about 10 watts per 10 GbE port. The cost is about $1,000 per port.

The pre-integrated and validated system that includes software and hardware that provide FabricPath functionality is called FabricPath Switching System, or FSS. The switch unveiled Wednesday is Catalyst 4948E. According to Cisco, it offers better capacity, performance, predicable latency, automation and visibility. It supports wire-speed IPv6, auto-provisioning and call-home features.

Cisco's new professional services include strategy, planning, design and implementation of cloud-based systems in clients' data centers. The company also rolled out new Intelligent Automation Solutions, which include new versions of the Tidal Enterprise Scheduler and Tidal Enterprise Orchestrator products, which provide rela-time IT process orchestration and batch automation.

The new WAN optimization solutions include WAAS, an on-demand service for the company's integrated service router G2, a Software-as-a-Service version of WAAS, Windows-server-on-WAAS and WAAS mobile for cloud infrastructures.

Pricing and availability of the new Cisco products and services announced on Wednesday: