Ten gigabits per second today, 100 gigabits per second in the future, and, if you still need them, the single gigabit connections of a few months ago, all fit in the picture. Then, add services through an orchestrated system that can quickly bring online the necessary storage and network assets.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [February 7, 2008]

San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems has a suite of products ready to answer future data center demand.

Tom Keenan, Cisco director of marketing for service provider solutions, says that the company calls its new data center vision Data Center 3.0. The first generation of data center advances brought consolidation, more assets in fewer locales. The second generation brought virtualization, allowing owners to use existing assets to fulfill growing needs. Now, data center planners and administrators alike want more automation. They want to be able to better manage and provision resources.

"The most recent advance in this Datacenter 3.0 vision is the introduction of the Nexus family of Data center class switches by Cisco. These products were designed by rethinking the critical demands of the data center from the ground up—a key piece was the design of the new operating system for the Nexus family (NX-OS), purpose built for the data center using the best of the existing Cisco SAN-OS and IOS operating systems," says Keenan.

"When our very smart NX-OS engineers sat down with our unforgiving customers," says Keenan, "they said, 'start with a carrier class OS and improve it from there.'" The IOS CLI interface, he adds, "preserves a link with the past," meaning that you won't need lots of new training classes to use it because it will be familiar if you're already comfortable with Cisco gear.

"Customers are demanding tougher and tougher SLAs," says Keenan. The response is "Graceful system operations," a feature described well by Light Reading. The feature should ensure that any individual node failure doesn't result in dropped packets or dropped VoIP calls.

Another key feature is the handling of any recalcitrant hardware. Cisco's version of out of band control is named "Lights Out Management" (LOM). "The management processor on the supervisor line card has its own out of band dedicated port and lightweight OS," explains Keenan. That means that administrators can access and repair the device remotely "for true lights out operation".

Of course, no crashes are anticipated. "Redundancy is built in. All critical processes (like routing protocols) are run in protected memory, and use NSF (non stop forwarding) to ensure continuous operation" says Keenan.

The Nexus
At the core of all of this is a big box, called the Nexus.

Was it necessary to put 15 Tbps of throughput in the box? Yes. Today, the lion's share of servers may operate at 1 Gbps (or less), but Keenan says that Cisco expects 10 GigE to be the norm by 2010 or 2011. That's because of applications like video, managed services, and other bandwidth intensive applications (we're guessing big and bigger databases).

"Our first device is a 10 slot device. Later this year, we'll release an 18 slot device," he adds.

Datamation's product listing for Nexus shows that the 10 slot device is quite powerful. Even with 2 slots dedicated to management, the 8 slots can deliver, he says, 256 ports at 10 GigE (the 18 slot device can deliver 512 ports of 10 GigE). When the system is operating at 40 GigE or 100 GigE, it will certainly need the full 15 Tbps in its backplane.

Beta customers listed in the press release include Microsoft and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The high bandwidth future
The product roadmap includes bigger boxes, as already noted, and more features. Cisco will be adding support for MPLS and some quite interesting features, consolidating the storage fabric by allowing the encapsulation of drop sensitive protocols like fiber channel over Ethernet, "thus creating a unified fabric".

Of interest to smaller Cisco shops is a planned smaller box, rackable or even a blade switch that will fit in, say, an IBM blade switch center.

It's not the high bandwidth demands of unusual customers such as those noted in the press release that make Keenan confident that the high bandwidth rates supported by the Nexus will find a market—it's the uses of the internet that are becoming common. "It's the amount of data produced on the internet that resides in applications in the internet," he says. "It ranges from online photo editing to federal, hospital, and retail records to service providers rolling out more video services. It will be the nexus of where that data is located."

And so will you, the service provider.

Pricing and availability
The Cisco 10 slot Nexus switch (Nexus 7010) starts at $75,000. Lease rates as low as 3.99 percent APR are available.

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