Nexus brings Cisco into new territory
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It&#39;s hard to overstate how important the&#160;Nexus data-center switching platform, set to be unveiled Monday, is to Cisco Systems: for the dominant networking vendor&#39;s enterprise business, it&#39;s the biggest thing since the Catalyst 6000, which made its debut in 1999, according to the two key executives on the project.At a dinner with press last week, they compared it to the CRS-1 (Carrier Routing System), a huge switch for the core of carrier networks that Cisco rolled out in 2004. To bring that platform to life, the company developed a new version of its flagship IOS (Internetworking Operating System) software and engineered the hardware to scale up to 92Tbps of throughput. The core of the Internet is Cisco&#39;s turf, and it wasn&#39;t willing to give any ground to upstarts.The Nexus brings Cisco into not just a new territory for its business, but a new product category: a unified switch that spans storage and computing in datacenters and has security built in. Given the stakes, superlatives are natural.-- A single Nexus chassis will be able to handle more than 15Tbps of traffic ripping through a data center, up from just 2Tbps for a current Catalyst 6500 switch.-- At that rate, the switch could run 5 million concurrent transcontinental conferencing sessions using Cisco&#39;s TelePresence Collaboration system. It could also copy the entire searchable Internet in 7.5 minutes.-- One interface module for the Nexus 7000 chassis will come with 32 10Gbps ports, and the platform is designed to support future interfaces including 100Gbps.-- The company spent about $250 million on research and development for the new platform, and at its peak, the Nexus R&amp;D team numbered more than 500 engineers, according to Tom Edsall, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Cisco&#39;s Data Center Business Unit.As with the Catalyst 6000 Series and the CRS-1, Cisco developed the Nexus with an eye to long-term needs. Where the CRS marked the debut of IOS XR, the first modular version of IOS, the Nexus will have Cisco&#39;s first OS that can be fully virtualized, called NX-OS. The Nexus will also break new ground with its lossless switching fabric, a departure from traditional Ethernet -- though backward compatible with it, Cisco said.The system also represents a gamble on FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), a still-emerging standard for sending traditional Fibre Channel storage network traffic over Ethernet. Though the new standard will probably succeed with the backing of Cisco and other big vendors, the installed base of Fibre Channel is huge, said Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. There will be a proving period for Ethernet as a reliable, lossless datacenter transport, he said.Cisco expects the uptake of the new platform to take time, just as it did with the CRS. The first Nexus product will go on sale in the second quarter of this year, and in the first year Cisco expects to see mostly trials of the new system, said Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco&#39;s datacenter group. Deployments will probably start to pick up in the second, third and fourth years after the introduction, she said.But just as the opportunity was huge for the CRS, as video and other traffic rose fast on carrier networks, the chance to capture next-generation datacenters is likely to justify Cisco&#39;s efforts on the Nexus line. Web-based services and applications, as well as outsourced computing offerings from Amazon.com and other companies, are powering the growth of massive data centers. Microsoft&#39;s MSN division is a test customer of the Nexus, said Ullal. Asked whether the mighty Google would buy in as well, Ullal said, &quot;I would hope so.&quot;
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A new appliance and new software announced today by Cisco are designed to help business users improve application performance over networks.
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Internet hardware giant Cisco Systems is said to be preparing to launch a new family of routers that can manage both voice and data applications.
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By Bobby White  At a Cisco Systems Inc. sales meeting in Las Vegas last month, new marketing chief Susan Bostrom took the stage to deliver an unorthodox message: Cisco, she said, was no longer just a company that provides network equipment.
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As servers and storage start to merge into unified, virtualized systems, Cisco wants to do the same thing with the networks that connect them.On Monday, the company is set to unveil a datacenter networking platform that eventually could take the place of both the Ethernet switches that link servers as well as the Fibre Channel devices that form storage networks. The Nexus series is designed both to meet exploding demands for bandwidth and energy efficiency within data centers and to simplify the jobs of IT administrators. In the process, it could help give Cisco the central role it seeks in IT infrastructure.Cisco is already a leading player in datacenter networks with its&#160;Catalyst series Ethernet switches&#160;and its MDS storage network platform. Now it hopes to transcend those separate systems using a single, unified switching fabric and the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard. The platform it will use, called Nexus, will be a line of routing switches in chassis, rack-mounted and blade form. The first of these, the Nexus 7000 chassis, will be generally available in the second quarter. Prices will start at $75,000, but a typical configuration will cost about $200,000, according to Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco&#39;s Data Center, Switching and Security Technology Group.Mark Drake is looking at the Nexus platform for future-proofing as his company, Health Management Associates, centralizes its data resources. The company runs about 60 hospitals, mostly in the Southeastern U.S. Health Management&#39;s current Catalyst switches are probably enough to handle connectivity needs in its data centers for the next two years, but it&#39;s hard to predict storage and processing requirements beyond that as he looks for the next generation, Drake said.&quot;I&#39;m looking at a little over ten years&#39; capacity,&quot; Drake said. The Nexus line is built to go far beyond the scale of the Catalysts, delivering more than 15Tbps. &quot;The capacity to grow is huge,&quot; he said.Another benefit Drake sees in the Nexus, which he has been told about but hasn&#39;t tested, is ease of management. Health Management is already trying to reduce IT staff costs by consolidating data centers from each hospital to a two main locations. Because the new platform combines storage and data switching along with security in a single switch and management interface, it could further simplify running those datacenters, he said.Initially, Cisco sees the Nexus switches at the core of datacenters that still use separate networks for processing and storage. But as FCoE emerges in storage systems, the Nexus could become the single connectivity platform, Ullal said. Its switching fabric is designed to be lossless, unlike a standard Ethernet system, which tolerates dropped packets, said Tom Edsall, senior vice president and CTO of the data center group. The platform also has built-in security features, including wire-speed encryption and authentication capability for each port.At the heart of the platform is a new, virtualized operating system, NX OS. As with server virtualization, NX OS can turn a Nexus switch into multiple logical switches running totally different processes, Ullal said . For example, one logical switch could handle storage and be managed by storage specialists, while the other links servers and is run by a different staff. A third could be a test platform. All would use a single switching fabric and set of redundant power supplies, which provides benefits in performance, economies of scale, and resiliency, she said. This virtualized architecture eventually will trickle down to other Cisco product lines, according to Ullal.Cisco also has automated some aspects of management with the Nexus line, drawing on best practices it learned partly from its customers, Edsall said. The system is designed to monitor and heal itself in many cases.The network&#39;s role in datacenters is growing as computing and storage are combined and shared, according to industry analysts. It&#39;s now the &quot;orchestrator&quot; of the datacenter, Zeus Kerravala of Yankee Group said. Cisco is the only vendor with both the networking and the computing experience to fulfill that role, he believes. But though many managers of datacenters want to see total virtualization of the datacenter, which could boost efficiency, they aren&#39;t yet ready for it.&quot;We&#39;re just entering the very early stages of the virtual datacenter,&quot; Kerravala said. &quot;This is probably at least two years away.&quot;Cisco is best positioned to build the core of datacenters because the network touches everything in it, according to Ullal, Edsall, and other executives.&quot;For Cisco, it&#39;s very critical that this platform be a launching pad to go further up the IT stack,&quot; said IDC&#39;s Cindy Borovick. However, taking control of datacenters won&#39;t be a walk in the park, she cautioned.&quot;Cisco&#39;s in a very strong position, but there are other very large suppliers that recognize how important the datacenter is and are willing to invest the R&amp;D dollars,&quot; Borovick said, citing IBM and Sun Microsystems. To Cisco&#39;s peril, datacenter administrators are more than willing to buy the best of many vendors rather than standardize on one, because they control the &quot;crown jewels&quot; of the enterprise, she said.
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Cisco today revamped its Catalyst Switch line with 10-gigabit speeds, enhanced security, and high availability, designed to bring high speed, security, and availability to the network edge.
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Taking a product tie-in a step further, Cisco is extending its current network management OEM agreement with IBM to support its newer Advanced Network Abstraction (ANA) technology.
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In a move to take dominion in the data center, networking giant Cisco has announced plans to purchase privately held NeoPath Networks for an undisclosed amount.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems is stepping up to the plate in the highly competitive application acceleration game, banking on technology and a lot of end-to-end network expertise to set it apart from other players. The company will announce on Tuesday that it is beefing up the WAFS (Wide-Area File Services) software it introduced last year so it can speed up application transactions and file transfers. It is also adding compression and other techniques so application traffic wonât take up so much network bandwidth, said Mark Weiner, director of marketing for application solutions at Cisco. Also this week, the company is set to roll out WAAS (Wide-Area Application Services) software, as well as more powerful versions of its WAE (Wide-Area Application Engine) appliances on which to run it. There will also be a WAAS module for Ciscoâs Integrated Services Router. Wide-area bandwidth is expensive, and software overhead can slow down applications even on a fat pipe. Wide-area file services allow companies to speed up the performance of those applications by caching copies of files locally and then managing updates and changes. Cisco competes with companies such as Juniper, which purchased WAFS vendor Peribit, and Riverbed, an application acceleration startup that enhanced its software and appliances last week and is aiming to go public. Cisco is late to the game with some of its new technology, but it can offer peace of mind by making the products work smoothly with a Cisco infrastructure, said Eric Siegel, an analyst at Burton Group. Pairing up Cisco gear worked well for the city of Fort Wayne, Ind., which wants to use WAAS to speed up communication with some of its fire stations, said CIO Clifford Clarke. WAAS seems to have performed better with Fort Wayneâs Cisco network than did other vendorsâ products, he said. Harold Hamm, vice president of IT at architecture firm Reynolds, Smith and Hills, said he couldnât buy the kind of WAN bandwidth heâd need to match his test results with the new gear. âOnce a big file gets cached on a local server, itâs like working on a LAN,â he said.
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Cisco said Friday that it had acquired Five Across, a small San-Francisco company that specializes in creating applications that allow companies to easily add social-networking functionality to their Web sites.
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Cisco Systems and Microsoft&#39;s partnership in the small and midsize business market is bearing fruit. On Monday, Cisco announced a new software product that will link its voice over Internet protocol products
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Can Ned Hooper keep the magic of Cisco's acquisition machine alive? A lot depends on the answer to that question.
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Cisco Systems Inc.  on  Wednesday said it has turned the corner on its routers business  and saw growing opportunities to expand its consumer strategy  with new video technologies.
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Cisco Systems(R) (NASDAQ:CSCO) today announced it has made enhancements to its Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) architecture to ease deployment of a wide range of business-focused and consumer-based services.
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Cisco Systems, the world&#39;s largest maker of equipment for directing Internet traffic says China is well on the way to becoming the world&#39;s technology hub.
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Cisco Systems is accelerating its push into the SMB market with the launch this week of entry-level switching modules, an aggregation switch and a Web-based management tool that helps smaller customers gain easier access to high-level features.
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Putting the family jewels on display Cisco has confirmed plans to open up its holy of holies: it'll let third parties develop applications for the Internetwork Operating System (IOS), the software leg of its cash cow router business.â¦