Cisco Unveils Latest Nexus Data Center Switch
Cisco this week unveiled a raft of networking enhancements and extensions designed to scale data centers to securely support increasing amounts of data.
Tue, October 18, 2011
Network World — Cisco this week unveiled a raft of networking enhancements and extensions designed to scale data centers to securely support increasing amounts of data.
As expected, Cisco rolled out the second generation of its Nexus 7000 switching platform, which scales the line to 15 terabits. Cisco also unveiled a new nine-slot Nexus 7000 chassis, as expected, as well as a 16-port 40Gbps Ethernet switch in its Nexus 3000 line for high-performance trading environments.
100G Ethernet coming to a Cisco rack near you?
Also, Cisco rolled out a 48-port 100/1000Mbps Nexus 3000 Ethernet switch, fabric extensions to the Nexus 5500 top-of-rack switch, and a virtual firewall to help secure multi-tenant and cloud environments.
The new and enhanced products allow the Nexus 7000 line to significantly scale 10G Ethernet density to support increasingly virtualized data centers that may support two and three times as many virtual machines as physical servers. Cisco says that by 2013, there will be 56 exabytes, or about 12.8 billion online movies, crossing the Internet per month.
To accommodate that, Cisco says the newly enhanced Nexus 7000 and 5500 can now support 12,000 physical servers at 10G each, double that of rival Juniper's QFabric line, and Alcatel-Lucent's OmniSwitch 6850E and 6900 switches.
"The scale is huge," says Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research. "Twelve thousand servers is a pretty good sized fabric."
The second-generation Nexus 7000 is encompassed in a new switching fabric for the product, called Fabric 2. Fabric 2 allows the switch to scale to 550G per slot, more than twice that of the 230G per slot capacity of Fabric 1. This allows an 18-slot Nexus 7018 core switch to support 768 line-rate 10G ports -- when equipped with a new 48-port 10G line card, which was also expected and announced -- at a price if $1,200 per port and a power draw of less than 10 watts.
Cisco says competitors Juniper, Brocade, Arista and HP would have to cluster between 10 and 70 switches in at least twice the rack unit space in order to achieve this density.
The previous 10G density limit for the Nexus 7000 under Fabric 1, with 32-port 10G line cards, was 512 10G ports in the Nexus 7018. In the new nine-slot Nexus 7009, which is targeted at smaller network cores and space-constrained environments, Fabric 2 and the 48-port 10G cards support 336 line-rate 10G ports. Cisco says the new Nexus 7009 can support for all currently shipping Nexus 7000 I/O modules, supervisor and power supplies.
