Data centre switches

Cisco has unveiled the nexus 5000 series of data centre-class switches, introduced interoperability via an ecosystem of application and systems partners and accelerated adoption with a data centre channel partner enablement strategy.

The series is a collaborative effort between Cisco and Nuova Systems.

The series is designed for data centre consolidation with investment protection. It also meets stringent user requirements for operational continuity, transport flexibility and scalability.

IT organisations can simplify cable infrastructure, reduce the needs of required adapters, lower costs and reduce power consumption and their carbon footprint. The series delivers line-rate, low-latency, 10 Gb ethernet switching, as well as the industry’s first standards-based, input/output consolidation via support for fibre channel over ethernet, data centre ethernet and virtualisation technologies.

The switch is an extension to the Nexus family designed to support increasing I/O demands of multicore processors and virtualised environments. With its support for FCoE, the series consolidates LAN, fibre channel and iSCSI-based storage-area networks and server cluster traffic onto an ethernet-based unified fabric.

It also provides virtual machine optimised services, supporting Data Centre 3.0 by allowing IT organisations to respond to changing business demands through rapid provisioning of application and infrastructure services from shared pools of consolidated compute, storage and network resources.