Cisco’s Nexus 7000: Data Center 3.0 January 29
4 years, 578 engineers, $250 million, and 1,513 Cisco patents issued or pending. Those are the numbers behind what some say are Cisco Systems’ next flagship switching line.
This is the future of the Data Center. Cisco’s Nexus 7000 is a 10 slot or 18 slot chassis that can deliver up to 15 Terabits per second. So where do we begin?
The Nexus 7000 can have up to 512 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, but support for 40 and 100 Gigabit interfaces is also on the road map as a future deliverable. Aside from the impressive port density and performance it is in fact a Green device! In fact its so green that Cisco says that it, “saves more power than networks generally consume”. It has a revolutionary Fabric Architecture, employs the TrustSec Security Architecture which is an identity and role based security solution, and uses a new IOS called NX-OS.
Network World has done a lot of the leg work already to provide a brief summary from Cisco’s press release:
The Unified Fabric Architecture of the Nexus 7000 is designed to provide all servers with access to all network and storage resources. Cisco says this architecture enables data center consolidation and virtualization, and eliminates the need for parallel storage and computational networks.A unified Fibre Channel over Ethernet I/O interface is a planned future deliverable, Cisco says.
Nexus includes a new modular, Linux-based operating system called NX-OS. NX-OS melds the company’s SAN OS from its SAN switching lines with its IOS routing code.
This modular design provides fault containment and automatic recovery so that processes can be remotely started, stopped and upgraded without human intervention, Cisco says.
The Nexus 7000 Series starts at $75,000 and is planned to be generally available in the second quarter.
There is also another brilliant write up on the release of this switch by Forbes.