Cisco announces new data centre switches and Dell collaboration

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 28 January 2009 09:29

Business IT - Technology

Cisco has unveiled a new range of switches for its Nexus family of virtualised data centre products. The Nexus platform is designed for next generation data centres using technologies such as virtualisation, Web 2.0 applications, and cloud computing.

The new switches include the Cisco Nexus 7018, Cisco Nexus 5010, and Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders.

The Cisco Nexus 7018, with an 18-Slot Chassis that provides up to 16 I/O module slots supporting up to 512 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, is designed for large data center deployments.

The Cisco Nexus 5010 28-port switch is a one rack unit switch supporting 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Cisco Data Center Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, and Fibre Channel, designed to consolidate traffic from local area networks, storage area networks and server clusters onto a single unified fabric.

The Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extender is designed to facilitate the connection of increased numbers of servers and increased demand for bandwidth from each server.

In addition to its new switches announcement, Cisco joined Dell to announce a new collaboration agreement.

According to the agreement, Dell will add Cisco’s Nexus 5020 switches that support both 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet to its Dell PowerEdge server and Dell EqualLogic, PowerVault, and Dell/EMC storage solutions.

The Cisco and Dell combined solutions are designed to help customers simplify the management of their data centres with a unified networking fabric that consolidates LAN, SAN and server cluster network environments into a single high speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabric that supports protocols such as Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, and Internet Small Computer Storage Interface.

In addition, Dell has qualified the Cisco's Catalyst 4900 Top of Rack switches as a supported switching platform for the EqualLogic SAN arrays.

 “These challenging economic times highlight the importance our customers  place on ensuring long term value from their solutions, not just short term benefit.  They need maximum value for every dollar they spend and that is what Dell continues to deliver with this expanded Cisco relationship,”   said Praveen Asthana, global director of enterprise storage and networking, Dell.

 “By offering the Cisco data center switching solution with our server and storage solutions, customers can now more easily transition to a unified network fabric and meet their requirements for operational continuity, transport flexibility and scalability.  The Dell and Cisco offerings will be very exciting for our customer and partner communities.”

“As part of our unified computing approach, Cisco set out to develop a unified networking fabric for the data center to help IT organisations simplify their cabling infrastructure, reduce the number of required adapters, lower costs, and reduce power consumption and their carbon footprint within their data center,”said Soni Jiandani, vice president of the Marketing, Server Access and Virtualization business unit for Cisco.

“By combining the benefits of lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet with Dell’s PowerEdge servers and storage solutions, together we can offer a more end-to-end data center virtualization solution.”