Cisco Ups its Nexus Data Center Game

Cisco is rolling out its next generation of Nexus data center switches, including a new Nexus 9000 model based on its custom ASIC and a Nexus 3000 model based on Broadcom's Tomahawk silicon.

The refreshed portfolio aims to transition the market from 10G and 40G ports to 25/50/100 Gbps at the same density of interfaces as existing systems. Cisco said it will now be able to deliver 25G at the previous price of 10G, and 100G at the previous price of 40G -- effectively 2.5x bandwidth at the same price.

In terms of network architecture and software programmability, Cisco is supporting three choices: its own, full-bore Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) architecture, running on the APIC controller in its Nexus 7K and flagship 9K switches, a programmable fabric vision that could also be supported on the new Nexus 3000 switches with Broadcom silicon, and a lighter Programmable Network architecture running on any of the Nexus switches and featuring NX-OS enhancements for DevOps, automation and segment routing.

With the new Nexus 9000 switches, Cisco said it will achieve industry-leading performance for 100Gbps, with 25 percent more non-blocking performance, at 50 percent the cost of comparable solutions, plus greater reliability and lower power. The new Nexus 9K switches will support real time network telemetry at 100Gbps wire rate, enabling network security with pervasive NetFlow and fabric wide troubleshooting.  The switches will also scale up to 10 times in IP addresses and end points at cloud scale, and support over a million containers per rack. The new Nexus 9K is also designed to drive unique cloud services with adaptive capacity and congestion control, allowing customers to support lossless traffic for IP storage, hyperconverged and converged infrastructure on a single unified fabric that enables application completion times 50 percent faster than traditional competitive platforms.

In addition, Cisco is announcing a new Cisco Nexus Fabric Manager that automates the complete fabric lifecycle management with a point-and-click web interface, and offers automated configuration snapshots and rollbacks. Nexus Fabric Manager builds and self-manages a VXLAN-based fabric, dynamically configuring switches based on simplified user-based actions. An IT manager can fully deploy a VXLAN-based fabric in just three steps, complete with zero touch provisioning, and can upgrade all fabric switches to a new software release in "only four mouse clicks."

Cisco also announced several new ACI ecosystem pioneers: Infoblox, which automates network configuration and change; N3N, which extends ACI visibility beyond the network to the entire data center; Tufin, which provides visibility, control and security change orchestration across heterogeneous environments; vArmour, which provides application-aware micro-segmentation with advanced security analytics; and Veritas, which collects, protects, analyzes and optimizes customers’ global data.

http://www.cisco.com

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Cisco Expands Nexus Data Center Switching Line

Cisco expanded its Nexus 9000 data center switching line with the introduction of two new models: the Nexus 9504 and Nexus 9516.  The new switches leverage the centralized policy-driven automation of the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and application profiles to help organizations build highly secure cloud networks and hybrid clouds.

• The Nexus 9516 boasts up to 576 wire-speed 40 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 60 Tbps throughput, making it the industry's highest density wire rate switch, according to Cisco. 
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• The Nexus 9504 provides a cost effective option to solve migration from core-aggregation-access to spine leaf architectures. With the Nexus 9504 partners now have new engagement options for customers seeking lower density aggregation and access designs.

Cisco also announced an addition to the Nexus 3000 family: the new Nexus 3164Q switch designed for massively scalable data centers (MSDC) and big data.

• The Nexus 3164Q supports a range of automation tools for Cloud providers including Linux Container support, XML, JSON, Puppet/Chef, Python, and OpenStack. It delivers flexible connectivity for either 40 Gigabit or 10 Gigabits ports (up to 256 10Gigabit ports) in a 2 RU and a rich NX-OS feature set. 

"Through automation and programmability embedded within our NX-OS platforms, training, support, and certifications, we are empowering over two million networking engineers and thousands of channel partners worldwide to enable our enterprise, commercial, service provider and cloud customers to expand their skill sets while embracing on-premise private and hybrid cloud models with ACI in the data center and across the Access and WAN," said Soni Jiandani, SVP, Cisco.

Cisco noted that its Nexus 3000 switches are being used by eight of the 10 leading cloud providers' networks for the majority of their footprint.

du, a leading integrated telecommunications service provider in the United Arab Emirates and the fastest growing operator in the Middle East, is consolidating several data facilities into two next generation data centers designed to host new cloud services.

http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1372860

In January 2014, as part of its recently launched Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) initiative, Cisco introduced an Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) Enterprise Module for extending
high-performing applications from the data center to wide-area networks (WAN) and local access networks (LAN). The goal is to provide enterprises with complete visibility into their networks, automating network and policy configuration while managing applications across the WAN and access networks.


The foundation for ACI is an Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), enhanced versions of the NX-OS data center switching operating system, and a new line of Nexus 9000 data center switches based on technology from Insieme Networks, the Cisco spin-in start-up that is being acquired and re-integrated into the company.

The Cisco APIC is a centralized clustered controller that is responsible for tasks ranging from fabric activation, maintenance of switch firmware, network policy configuration and instantiation. Cisco APIC is
completely removed from the data path.

The Cisco APIC serves as the single point of automation and fabric element management in
both physical and virtual environments.

The Cisco APIC Enterprise Module is constructed of three elements: a consolidated network information database, policy infrastructure and automation.

To address security concerns, Cisco APIC automates network-wide rapid threat detection and mitigation by integrating and automating Cisco Sourcefire  security solutions.  For compliance management across branches and headquarters, Cisco APIC also provides network-wide Quality of Service (QoS), and accelerates Intelligent WAN (IWAN) deployments. It can also be used with third-party solutions to provide an end-to-end WAN orchestration and management.

Cisco said its APIC frees up time for IT that would otherwise be spent configuring networking equipment and updating policy changes device by device. It automates many IT functions enabling configuration and policy changes to be pushed out to the individual components of the network instead of requiring IT to update each one manually. It also enables policies to automatically adapt to network changes which would be very difficult to set otherwise.

Cisco APIC supports both new and existing network infrastructures via a selection of network Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), including OpenFlow, Cisco onePK and Command Line Interface (CLI). The Cisco APIC Enterprise Module also supports both new SDN-ready devices as well as older Cisco network equipment, enabling the same IT automation as with Cisco ACI for a large existing installed base that eliminates the need to rip and replace existing networking equipment to take advantage of this new functionality. 

The Cisco APIC Enterprise Module leverages the Glue Networks' "Gluware Intelligent Orchestration Engine" 

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