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Douglas Gourlay from Cisco has posted a comment on this site which probably explains some of the features of the Nexus 7000 much better than I possibly could. Please check it out.
Cisco just announced its Nexus 7000 switch will be available in the second half of 2008.
The Nexus is a rather large machine that boasts a number of improvements over the 6500 series switches. If you have recently made a large purchase of 6500 series switches for your enterprise, you have my sympathy.
Andy Greenberg covers the technical beat at Forbes.com and explains some of the benefits of the behemoth box in plain English. For example, the Nexus has Gigabit Ethernet support (as well as support for future delivery of 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s,) so that you can run your whole data center with just Ethernet.
The killer feature, according to Greenberg, is that the Nexus 7000 allows distant virtual servers to use parallel processing. In other words, the virtual server in San Juan can now take advantage of idle cycles on the virtual server in Philadelphia, and vice versa. But there's more to it than that. The Cisco NX-OS, the new OS for the Nexus 7000, is said to allow switches to be virtualized at the device level, doing for switches what VMWare did for servers - that is, it not only helps get virtualized systems into parallel processing clusters but network engineers can create "domains" which define particular combinations of "bandwidth, processing, storage, and software," according to an article in BusinessWeek.
In addition to the obvious benefits, using previously unused resources can do a great amount towards reducing energy consumption and costs.
For a real look at the Nexus 7000, Cisco has provided an interactive model of the Cisco Nexus 7000 on their Web site.
What are your thoughts on the Cisco Nexus 7000? Feel free to discuss it in our comments section.
Comments
Hello there! Just want to clarify a few things-
1) The Catalyst 6500 is in no way 'dead'. In fact we have over 1000 engineers working on the Catalyst 6500 alone and an active R&D roadmap through at least 2012 right now that includes a doubling of the existing backplane capacity and higher speed interfaces, increased density and so on. Remember at the same time we introduced the Cisco Nexus Family we also doubled the capacity of the Catalyst 6500 to 130 10GbE interfaces, and a new chassis with front to back airflow and cooling.
There are significant features in the Catalyst 6500 that I do not intend to ever replicate in the Nexus Family keeping the Catalyst squarely positioned in the 1/10GbE transition space, Campus, Branch, WAN Aggregation, and Metro: four topologies which have features that are not planned on the Nexus Family.
2) I am not sure what you mean by "the Nexus 7000 allows distant virtual servers to use parallel processing." We have implemented a Unified Fabric in the Nexus Family that will support FibreChannel over Ethernet and allow the network to dramatically simplify the interface between servers and the network: reducing from several disparate interfaces like Ethernet, FibreChannel, Infiniband, to a smaller number of higher performance interfaces based on Ethernet.
You are accurate that we support 'Virtual Device Contexts' these allow a switch to be segmented in a similar fashion to what VMWare does to a server - allowing multiple separate administrative domains to exist on the same physical device. Thus the administrative burden and operational complexities that often dictated separate parallel infrastructure can be absorbed into one highly reliable network device.
I hope this helps- feel free to email me if there are any questions.
dg
Posted by: Douglas Gourlay | January 30, 2008 10:33 PM
With the vertical blades how do you recommend populating ports? How do you dress cables into cable managers? Do you have to go across existing blades left to right? Go up into the finger management, is that enough room for populating blades in chassis? What if you need to replace a blade in teh middle? What is Cisco recommending?
Posted by: Pat | September 5, 2008 10:34 AM