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Cisco Unveils Nexus 7000 Series Data Center-Class Platform

February 2008 by Marc Jacob

Cisco® announced a family of data
center-class switching platforms, the Cisco Nexus Series, to meet customer demands for nextgeneration
mission-critical data centers. As the data center transitions to a more services-centric
model, the network plays a pivotal role in orchestrating virtual IT resources and scaling
workloads. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series was designed with this environment in mind,
delivering the infrastructure chapter of Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 vision.

The new data center platform with both hardware and software
innovations, including:
· The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series, the flagship data center-class switching platform
combining Ethernet, IP, and storage capabilities across one unified network fabric
· The Cisco Trusted Security (TrustSec) architecture
· An operating system, the Cisco Nexus Operating System (NX-OS), and the
Cisco Data Center Network Manager

The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series is the flagship member of the Cisco Nexus Family, the first in a
new data center class of switching products. The Nexus 7000 is a highly scalable modular
platform that delivers up to 15 terabits per second of switching capacity in a single chassis,
supporting up to 512 10-gigabits-per-second (Gbps) Ethernet and future delivery of 40- and 100-
Gbps Ethernet. Its unified fabric architecture combines Ethernet and storage capabilities into a
single platform, designed to provide all servers with access to all network and storage resources.

This enables data center consolidation and virtualization. Key components of the unified fabric
architecture include unified I/O interfaces and Fibre Channel over Ethernet support to be
delivered in the future.
The Nexus 7000 is designed specifically for the data center with improved airflow, integrated
cable management, and a resilient platform architecture. The data plane is fully distributed and,
when coupled with the Cisco NX-OS operating system, is designed to enable zero servicedisruption
upgrades on production systems. This provides a seamless systems design that reduces
administrative tasks and simplifies complex systems operations.

Building data centers based on a unified fabric eliminates the need for parallel storage and
computational networks, reducing the number of server interfaces and significantly reducing the
cabling and switching infrastructure required. A unified fabric also enables customers to move to
higher-density server form factors, increasing the IT workload output of each data center.
Combined with virtualization, this new technology will help customers to build more efficient
and sustainable data centers, maximizing IT workload for each facility and saving more power
overall than the network generally consumes. The Nexus 7000 architecture is designed around
this lossless unified fabric capable of simultaneously forwarding storage, Ethernet, and IP traffic.
The fabric scales performance linearly with each fabric module and is logically partitioned for
efficient unicast and multicast traffic, making it ideally suited for market data video as well as
collaboration applications.
Microsoft is currently performing rigorous testing of the Nexus 7000 Series for security,
manageability and performance in a lab environment. “We appreciate the modular processes of
the Cisco Nexus operating system designed to resolve problems in real time without impact to
production traffic, as well as data center-class high-availability features and unified fabric
support,” said Debra Chrapaty, corporate vice president, Global Foundation Services, Microsoft.

At the heart of the Nexus 7000 Series is the NX-OS software, purpose-built to maximize data
center resiliency and to consolidate disparate networks. NX-OS combines the best of Cisco’s
SAN-OS, Layer 2 switching, Layer 3 routing protocols, and advanced virtualization capabilities
into one reliable operating system with the familiar Cisco IOS® interface.
NX-OS has many innovative features, including:
• Zero-service-disruption upgrades
• Virtual device contexts
• Graceful systems operations
• XML interfaces to access switch information or any command

NX-OS delivers zero-service-disruption system upgrades to maximize production uptime while
self-diagnostic capabilities continuously track each software component in the operating system.
If a failure is detected, NX-OS policies enable stateful process restart without service disruption.
This modular design provides fault containment and automatic recovery so that processes can be
remotely started, stopped and upgraded without human intervention.
Innovative virtualization capabilities such as virtual device contexts allow the system to be
partitioned into multiple logical devices, each with its own processes and command-line
interface running independent of one another. This system may be used by hosting providers and
complex enterprise administrative models, to be shared by multiple administrators concurrently,
each with its own switching environment.

Securing the Data Center with Cisco Trusted Security

The Nexus 7000 Series is the first platform to deliver Cisco Trusted Security, a new architecture
introduced last month that integrates identity- and role-based security across data centers. (See
news release at http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2007/prod_120507.html.) Cisco TrustSec
enforces trusted traffic segmentation without requiring complex addressing models and
unmanageable access control lists. This enables virtual machine mobility throughout the data
center while helping to ensure data integrity with a wire-rate AES-128 encryption
implementation on every port of the Nexus 7000.
The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has
reviewed the new Cisco data center switch for the high performance computing systems
scientists employ for national security research. Applications such as research in fusion energy,
atmospheric modeling, and the simulation of other physical phenomena, can benefit greatly from
increased network bandwidth for data movement between parallel file systems and archival
storage.

Cisco Data Center Network Manager
Supporting the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series, the Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM)
provides visibility across data center networks. Built on the foundation of Cisco Fabric Manager for storage networks, DCNM provides topology discovery and visualization for increased
operational efficiency and systems awareness. Nexus 7000 management interfaces are fully
compatible with Cisco VFrame Data Center, an orchestration platform that uses network
intelligence to provision resources together as virtualized services. VFrame DC will be a key
enabler for services orchestration on the Nexus platform.

 Pricing and Availability
The Nexus 7000 Series starts at $75,000, can be ordered globally now, and is planned to be
generally available in the second quarter of calendar year 2008. Cisco Capital SM is offering
financing for data center solutions globally. In the United States, Cisco Capital is offering lease
rates as low as 3.99 percent APR for the Cisco Nexus 7000.
Additional Information and Resources
Cisco also announced today the expansion of its Catalyst® family with innovative additions to its
modular, fixed and blade platforms.


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