Cisco Unveils New Nexus, Catalyst Additions
1/27/2009 -- Cisco Systems Inc. this week fleshed out its Nexus series of server access switches and announced new enhancements for its Catalyst switching line.
The catalyst, Cisco said, is virtualization. The new Nexus additions and Catalyst improvements -- which include the Nexus 7018, Nexus 5010 and Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders, as well as a number of enhancements to Cisco's Catalyst 6500 line -- are designed to address the requirements of next-generation, highly virtualized datacenter environments.
Cisco's Nexus 7018, for example, ships with an 18-Slot Chassis and can be outfitted with up to 16 I/O module slots. That lets it support as many as 512 10Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) ports -- quite a lot of bandwidth for quite a lot of virtual system images. Cisco also announced the Nexus 5010, a 1U, all-in-one, 28-port switch that boasts 10 GigE, Cisco Data Center Ethernet (DCE), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Fibre Channel support.
Elsewhere, Cisco announced a new 48-port Gigabit Ethernet fiber line card that's designed to support mixed Gigabit and 10 GigE environments.
Other new deliverables include the Nexus 2148T Fabric Extenders, which -- when paired with dual Nexus 5020 Switches -- can provide Gigabit Ethernet connectivity for nearly 2,500 virtual servers.
On the Catalyst tip, Cisco introduced new features that permit customers to recast their Catalyst 6500 switches as virtualized service nodes. Cisco also announced an "In-Service-Software-Upgrade" feature for Catalyst devices.
Cisco spins the announcements as consistent with its Datacenter 3.0 push. "Today, the architectural shift in the datacenter marks an IT market transition that will drive the benefits of virtualization to an entirely new level," said Ed Bugnion, CTO of Cisco's Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit, in a prepared release. "Nexus technology supports our Cisco Datacenter 3.0 vision to help customers respond to changing business demands by providing support for virtualization directly into the datacenter infrastructure." --Stephen Swoyer
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