Few days ago Cisco Systems, Inc announced an innovative family of data centre-class switching platforms, the Cisco Nexus Series, to meet customer demands for next-generation mission-critical data centres. As the data centre 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 Centre 3.0 vision.

The series is designed specifically for the data centre with improved airflow, integrated cable management, and resilient platform architecture. The product is designed around a lossless unified fabric capable of simultaneously forwarding storage, Ethernet, and IP traffic. Experts says this is an effort to reconstruct the data centre and cut expenses by creating what it calls a “unified fabric architecture” that seeks to converge the input/output (I/O) of servers into one pipe.

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.

So we are looking at a whole new generation of hardware and software innovation from Cisco house:

1. The Cisco Nexus Operating System (NX-OS), and the Cisco Data Centre Network Manager.
2. The fabulous Cisco Trusted Security (TrustSec) architecture.
3. And finally off course The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series, the flagship data centre-class switching platform combining Ethernet, IP, and storage capabilities across one unified network fabric.

Hold on it’s not done yet! The Nexus 7000 Series starts at US$75,000, can be ordered from anywhere in the world, and will be available sometimes second quarter of calendar year 2008.