Cisco Bolsters Catalyst Switches
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By Hochmuth, Phil  New stackables support Cisco's IOS Software Activation feature  Cisco last week juiced up its Catalyst switch line with gear that boosts Power-over-Ethernet support, backup power and failover, and 10G Ethernet connectivity at the LAN edge.
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Cisco has rolled out the first product to result from its collaboration with Microsoft, targeting the SMB market. The new CRM Communications Connector ties Cisco&#39;s IP contact-center applications
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Cisco Systems Inc has made a slew of announcements, which include beefing up 10Gb connectivity on its switches and launching fan-less compact versions of a couple of its midrange boxes for markets like education, utilities and the public sector.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems and IBM are expanding a cooperative support offering from the U.S. to 46 other markets. Through the offering, called Managed Maintenance Solutions (MMS) for Cisco Products, enterprises that use IBM as a systems integrator can get Cisco technical support by calling IBM. It is designed to simplify IT administrators' jobs and prevent them from having to choose between turning to Cisco or IBM for help, said Cisco spokeswoman Mandy Knotts. Cisco has a worldwide technical support organization but is not a systems integrator. The companies began working together on support three years ago as part of the Cisco Global Services Alliance, Knotts said. Over time they developed the MMS offering, which so far has been available only in the U.S., Knotts said. It is now being expanded to markets in Europe and Asia, including the U.K., France, Germany, China, Australia, South Korea and India, as well as Canada. The expansion was set to be announced Monday. Customers with MMS can make all their calls for Cisco technical support through the IBM Technical Support Center, which can provide network specialists trained by Cisco. The service also includes escalation of issues to Cisco Technical Assistance, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, plus operating system updates and hardware replacement, according to Cisco. Â
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Cisco Systems Inc. surprised investors  on Tuesday with a stronger-than-expected outlook and quarterly  profit as demand for network equipment to handle Web traffic  showed no signs of weakening, driving its shares up 5 percent.
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Cisco Systems on Tuesday announced enhancements to its Catalyst switching product line, and also announced &quot;the industry&#39;s first&quot; Gigabit Ethernet-enabled IP phone.
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Fujitsu Limited and Cisco Systems, Inc. today announced that they have reached a fundamental agreement to enter into a strategic alliance focusing on routers and switches that will enable service providers
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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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'Data Center 3.0' initiative gets rolling Cisco is selling a new obscenely large switch, tapped as the lynchpin of its "Data Center 3.0" virtualization initiative the company has been gabbing about for monthsâ¦
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Hewlett-Packard has announced that it would add Cisco's double data rate InfiniBand-based server fabric switches to HP's Unified Cluster Portfolio, and that HP BladeSystem c-Class servers are now supported with Cisco's InfiniBand host driver software.
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Fujitsu has joined the networking parade by agreeing to sell Cisco&#39;s high-end routers and switches in Japan. It should come as no surprise as the market for high-end routers heats up.
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Two new switches from Cisco demonstrate a sweeping change in the company&#39;s assumptions about the technical knowledge of network managers.
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DECEMBER 06, 2004  - Cisco Systems Inc. last week added two supervisor engines with 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports to its midrange and high-end switch lines, and Alcatel and Hewlett-Packard Co.
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The company now supports mobility in its latest upgrade of Cisco Unified Communications.
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European telecom equipment maker looks to push into corporate switching, a market long dominated by Cisco.
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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 Systems Inc. (csco.o) on Tuesday  reported quarterly revenue and income that exceeded market  expectations as companies upgraded their networks, sending its  shares up 9 percent.