Actu
Cisco Introduces New Switching Foundation for Data Center 3.0
January 2008 by Marc Jacob
Cisco® introduced innovative new solutions that continue to
help customers realize the Cisco Data Center 3.0 vision for next-generation data centers. The culmination
of this is the introduction of the network platform for Data Center 3.0, the Cisco Nexus® Family of datacenter-
class switches, and the expansion of the Cisco Catalyst® Family. This new infrastructure is the
next step in helping customers to design and build data center architectures that meet the stringent
operational continuity, transport flexibility and scalability requirements of the next-generation data center.
Today’s new offerings build on Cisco’s data center switch market share leadership, more than 15 years of
Catalyst switch innovation and an architectural approach specifically designed to unify all components of
the data center. Over the next 18 months, Cisco will continue to invest in its data center efforts by adding
significant new products and capabilities to help customers architect next-generation data centers.
Cisco Continues to Enhance the Flagship Catalyst 6500 Series: 16-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet
Module and Catalyst 6509-V-E Chassis
To address the evolution from Gigabit Ethernet to 10 Gigabit Ethernet for data center access, Cisco now
offers a data-center-optimized 16-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Module that provides up to 130 ports of 10
Gigabit Ethernet per Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switch and 260 ports per Catalyst 6500 Virtual
Switching System. This new module increases the architectural scalability of the Catalyst 6500 which
can help reduce power consumption by up to 50 percent per port. The new module doubles the 10-
Gigabit Ethernet port density of the Catalyst 6500 and will help enable high-performance campus local
area network (LAN) aggregation, so customers can scale bandwidth for video, mobility and other
collaboration applications.
To simplify data center operations and offer the highest level of investment enhancement, Cisco also
introduced the Cisco Catalyst 6509 Enhanced Vertical Chassis (V-E) as part of the Cisco Catalyst 6500-E
Series Switches. The Catalyst 6509-V-E chassis offers nine vertical slots with front-to-back airflow,
which is a requirement for the hot-aisle/cold-aisle designs in modern data center and service provider colocation
deployments. As a part of the Catalyst 6500-E Series Switches, the Cisco Catalyst 6509
Enhanced V-E will support up to 80 gigabit per second (Gbps) per slot for future supervisor engines and
modules, delivering architectural investment protection and the ability to meet increasing bandwidth
requirements for years to come.
Today the Catalyst 6509-V-E supports the Catalyst 6500 Supervisor
Engine 720 and 32 Families as well as associated LAN, wide-area network (WAN) and other services
modules for superior customer investment enhancement and lower total cost of ownership.
The Cisco Catalyst 4900M Series is designed and optimized for the data center rack-server aggregation.
Ideal for data center deployments that require the ultimate in flexibility, the Catalyst 4900M Series offers
transport flexibility with optimized buffering for top-of-rack switching and mixing 10/100/1000 and 10
Gigabit Ethernet ports with up to 40 10/100/1000 ports or twenty-four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports. The
Catalyst 4900M is a 320-Gbps, 250 million packets per second (mpps), two-rack-unit (2RU) fixedconfiguration
switch that provides operational continuity with redundant power and fans and investment
protection for easy migration to 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
As a solution to address scalability and consolidation requirements within the data center, many enterprise
customers are increasingly turning to blade servers, a server architecture that houses multiple server
modules, or “blades” in a single chassis. Today Cisco announced that the Cisco Catalyst Blade Switches
will be available for Dell’s new PowerEdge M1000e blade server enclosure. This will provide customers
with consistent network security, high availability, and quality of service with Gigabit Ethernet
performance from the server edge out to the clients at the network edge.
On the new Catalyst Blade Switch, Cisco also introduced Virtual Blade Switch (VBS) technology that
allows up to eight switches to be managed as one logical switch for reduced infrastructure complexity.
This innovation is the foundation of the blade switches’ ability to deliver performance and resilience
while simplifying data center design, operations and management. The VBS technology provides
unprecedented 160-Gbps upstream performance while doubling the bandwidth to a server at the same
time. This is especially important for emerging Web 2.0 applications that generate increased inter-server
communications.
The Foundation for Data Center Transformation: Cisco Nexus 7000 Series
The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series is the first series of switches specifically designed to meet the requirements
of data centers and scale to industry-leading 15 terabits per second (Tbps). Purpose built to meet the
requirements of the most mission-critical data centers, it delivers significant performance and density for
continuous system operations and has the transport flexibility to support emerging protocols to prepare
for migration to a unified fabric in the data center. Building on Cisco’s proven storage area network
(SAN) operating system and Cisco IOS® Software, the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series introduces the Nexus
Operating System (NX-OS) which delivers real-time system upgrades with exceptional manageability and
serviceability. Cisco also introduced a comprehensive and centralized administration solution, Cisco Data
Center Network Manager (DCNM), to simplify data center network operations.
