New Cisco Nexus 5010 28-Port Switch

Responding to customers’ desires to transform their data centers into virtualized environments, Cisco Systems, Inc. unveiled additions to the Cisco Nexus Family of switches and enhancements to Cisco Catalyst products. Cisco is introducing the Cisco Nexus 7018, Cisco Nexus 5010, and Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders, adding to the Nexus Family of switches specifically designed for the stringent requirements of next-generation data centers.

 
Cisco Nexus 5010 28-port switch

With the Nexus platform, IT organizations can take advantage of a unified fabric and optimize for architectural changes such as virtualization, Web 2.0 applications, and cloud computing. Cisco technology reduces the barriers to integrated data center virtualization by delivering greater network awareness and transparency to virtualization. These new technologies are at the foundation of Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 vision to deliver a unified fabric and unified computing.

New Nexus Products and Catalyst 6500 Enhancements:

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 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports to meet the demands of the largest data center deployments.

• Designed for the requirements of highly scalable 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks in mission-critical data centers, the Cisco Nexus 7018 and Nexus 7010 are modular switches that are capable of delivering continuous system operation and virtualized, pervasive services.
• 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 clusters onto a single unified fabric.

• The Cisco Nexus 5000 Series is designed for data center consolidation combined with strong investment protection, helping customers to transition to a unified fabric at their own pace while meeting stringent customer requirements for operational continuity, transport flexibility and scalability. With a unified fabric, IT organizations can simplify cabling infrastructure, reduce the number of required adapters, lower costs, and reduce power consumption and their carbon footprint.

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.

• 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.
• Combining Cisco Nexus 2000 switches and Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches provides a highly cost-effective 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.

Cisco Services has expanded its services offerings to support the new additions to the Cisco Nexus family, with the goal of helping customers realize the full potential of next-generation architecture.

"Today, the architectural shift in the data center marks an IT market transition that will drive the benefits of virtualization to an entirely new level," said Ed Bugnion, CTO, Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit, Cisco. "Nexus technology supports our Cisco Data Center 3.0 vision to help customers respond to changing business demands by providing support for virtualization directly into the data center infrastructure."

"In this current economic climate, IT organizations are especially pressed to continue innovating while cutting costs and increasing efficiency," said Joe Skorupa, Research VP, Enterprise Network Services and Infrastructure at Gartner. "CIOs and IT managers are particularly looking at technologies that protect their existing IT investments, offer a fast ROI, and provide a transition path to future technology advances with real benefits."

Supporting over 26,000 students and staff, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is upgrading its campus data centers using Cisco Nexus technology to provide cost-effective next-generation IT capabilities that increase bandwidth and improve application performance, security, and manageability. "At CUHK, we proactively plan for the future by developing information technology infrastructure to support both our current and anticipated student and faculty requirements," said Mr. Philip Leung, Director, Information Technology Services Centre, CUHK. "The Cisco Nexus platform will help our data centers to better support a Web 2.0 learning environment, support more internet-based collaboration with rich multimedia applications, and support student enrollment growth, while also improving operational efficiency."

McDermott Will & Emery, a premier international law firm that represents commercial, industrial, and financial enterprises, designed its new data center using Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches and Cisco MDS 9513 Multilayer Directors. "We were building out a brand new data center from scratch and decided to move into the new unified fabric technology and a 10Gb Ethernet network architecture to prepare for our upcoming Virtual Desktop Infrastructure implementation," says Edward Carroll, Network Architect at McDermott Will & Emery. "What we wanted was a smaller footprint and increased performance, along with the ability to virtualize and consolidate using blade servers and the Nexus 5000."

"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology deployed the Cisco Nexus platform to help virtualize our data center and to consolidate numerous departmental data centers throughout the campus," said Theresa Regan, director of operations and infrastructure services for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "We gained 10Gb Ethernet performance, and reduced cost by conserving space, power and cooling. In addition, with the ability to provide virtualized services centrally we can now fully leverage data center resources to support core academic and administrative applications."