UPDATED 12:45 EDT / OCTOBER 18 2011

NEWS

Cisco’s Major Portfolio Expansion: Adapted for Big Data

Networking giant Cisco has had a rough ride this past year, undergoing a major restructuring in its efforts to return to its core business.  Today Cisco took an important step forward, adding new switches to its networking portfolio and updated several existing offerings. The emphasis is on virtualized deployments and big data.

Cisco introduced the second generation Nexus 7000 Series, including the new Nexus 7009. The company claims the new line-up comes with a major capacity and performance boost: it exemplified in a release that it would be possible to simultaneously stream 4.5 million Netflix movies at an average of 3.5GB each, download the 250 million 1MB pictures uploaded to Facebook a day in 114 seconds, and send out 8TB worth of tweets in 3.6 seconds.

“The new Fabric 2 module and new high density L2/L3 10GbE F2 Series line card for the Nexus 7000 Series offer the industry’s highest performance and reduced power.  Combined with integrated FabricPath and Fabric Extender (FEX) support, the Cisco fabric architecture delivers unparalleled scale and operational simplicity.”

The latest addition to the product family, the Nexus 7009, features a compact form factor of 14RU in addition to support for all the existing Nexus 7000 I/O modules and Cisco’s NX-OS datacenter operating system.

The Nexus 5500 Series also got an upgrade, the addition of FabricPath support. Lastly, the Nexus 3300 switches represent the third expanded series: two new sub- microsecond low latency switches have been unveiled, designed for high performance workloads such as data analytics.

“Cisco is looking to rebound from recent struggles by increasing focus on its core data center switching portfolio,” Wikibon Senior Analyst Stuart Miniman says.  “As customers look to deploy and scale out 10 Gigabit Ethernet environments, they are looking for partners with a strong vision and products that meet today’s budgets and environmental (power and space) limitations. Cisco’s updates to its Nexus portfolio support a broad spectrum of technology requirements under a common operational framework.”

This latest milestone is just one of many developments from Cisco lately. On top of the major updates, there have been other additions made, such as IPv6 support for the Cisco Application Control Engine portfolio (see more on virtualization demands for ethernet fabric architectures here).

Yesterday Cisco had another launch. In partnership with competitor Hewlett-Packard the two companies announced the Cisco Fabric Extender for HP BladeSystem, which is designed to power customers that are using HP’s c-Class BladeSystem servers with the Cisco United Fabric. The new product helps to avoid steeper infrastructure investments.


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