Next-Generation Network Solutions

Network World — From a data center perspective, the last five years have been very interesting. We've seen a huge push by customers of all sizes to reduce costs and improve data center performance and resiliency.

In the process, we get called on to assess whether existing network architectures can meet the requirements, or whether a transition to next-generation architectures -- for example, Cisco's Unified Data Center -- would be best.

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The first order of work is to understand the customer's business and technical needs. For example, many companies have opted to move from physical servers to virtual servers. Over the last four to five years, server virtualization has been driving transitions from 1G to 10G Ethernet. With that, we have seen potential issues with oversubscription at several places in the network -- particularly in the data center core, where there may be a lot of servers, and in aggregation, where multiple locations come together. We have also seen challenges associated with existing architectures and workload mobility.

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Consolidation is another significant factor to consider during virtualization. Due to 10G growth, relying on an organization's existing architecture during consolidation usually requires not only a supervisor and linecard uplift, but in some cases, more chassis -- and those additional chassis come with higher costs for space, power, cooling, cabling and maintenance.

Next-generation example: Cisco's Nexus 7000 platform

Requirements will vary from one organization to the next, but the beauty of a next-generation solution such as Cisco's Unified Data Center, in particular incorporating the Nexus 7000 platform, is that it's designed with Layer 2 switching/Layer 3 routing modular performance, making it especially great for virtualization, consolidation and redundancy, even in a dense, high-performance data center core.

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Essentially, it enables your trusted solutions provider to design a cost-effective, highly available, resilient, 10G wire rate collapsed architecture. It is important for organizations to understand the value of a solution such as the Nexus 7000 platform, but perhaps even more important to understand that this type of solution can provide organizations of any size with a smoother transition during data center consolidation and virtualization.

Operational efficiencies are just as important as performance in the data center. Customers that opt for a next generation solution will have operational flexibility in the same way that they have a choice of Internet operating systems. For example, Cisco's Nexus 7000 platform offers:

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