Cisco unveiled a number of additions to its Nexus family of switches along with several enhancements to its Catalyst product line. These include:
- The new Cisco Nexus 7018 joins the Nexus 7000 Series with an 18-Slot Chassis that provides up to 16 I/O module slots supporting up to 512 10Gigabit Ethernet ports to meet the demands of the largest data center deployments. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series supports end-to-end data center connectivity, consolidating IP, storage, and interprocess communication (IPC) networks onto a single Ethernet fabric.
- A new 48-port Gigabit Ethernet fiber line card also joins the Nexus family to support mixed Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet environments. Virtual Port Channels (VPC) also enable higher availability, large-scale virtual machine mobility, and higher bandwidth.
- Improved data center energy efficiency - the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series uses power supplies with up to 90 percent efficiency. Fan modules in the chassis adjust to compensate for changing thermal characteristics, meaning less power is wasted as heat and more power is available for the system to use.
- The new Cisco Nexus 5010 28-port switch is a one rack unit (RU) switch supporting 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Cisco Data Center Ethernet (DCE), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Fibre Channel, able to consolidate traffic from local area networks, storage area networks and server cluster onto a single unified fabric.
- The new Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extender helps IT managers cope with two key data center factors: increasing numbers of servers and increased demand for bandwidth from each server. The Cisco Nexus 2148T Fabric Extenders connected to dual Cisco Nexus 5020 Switches can support up to 2,496 Gigabit Ethernet servers, greatly improving scalability of the access layer without increasing management points within the network. The Cisco Nexus 2000 switches can be combined with the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches provides as an access-layer strategy for Gigabit Ethernet and mixed Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet server environments.
- Cisco Catalyst 6500 enhancements enable customers to use the Catalyst 6500 as a virtualized service node together with a Nexus core to secure and accelerate applications cost effectively. Other software enhancements include an In-Service-Software-Upgrade and support for long range integrated 10GbE optics reduce the time needed for planned network maintenance and facilitate virtual machine mobility across data centers.
