Cisco has released a slew of new and updated products that it hopes will integrate its Unified Fabric, Computing and Network Services into a single data centre fabric.
The developments centre on its Data Centre Business Advantage portfolio and include the Nexus family, including the introduction of the ultra-low latency 3000 Series Switch, as well as changes to the management side of things.
Cisco claims that the single data centre fabric can provide ‘wire once’ agility from the server to the storage array for both physical and virtualised environments.
Included in the Unified Fabric updates are two new switches, the Nexus 5548UP and 5596UP. These 48- and 96-port data centre switches have unified port capability meaning they can be designated 1Gb Ethernet, 10Gb Ethernet, Fibre Channel (2/4/8 Gb) or FCoE. The new Nexus 3000 Series is an ultra-low latency platform that Cisco says is just right for specific markets, such as high frequency trading applications.
Also on the Unified Fabric front are developments to Cisco’s fabric extender technology (FEX). This enables IT admins to build a fabric that stretches that extends from the Nexus switches to Unified Computing System servers to adapters and to virtual machines, Cisco said.
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The firm has introduced three additions to the FEX range. Adapter FEX, to provide bandwidth segmentation; VM-FEX, which extends the switching fabric to the server hypervisor; and FEX support for the Nexus 7000.
Cisco has also updated its management tools. The new Data Centre Network Manager (DCNM) enables SAN, LAN, and server teams to manage the converged end-to-end data centre networks up to 150,000 ports.
The NX-OS data centre operating system spans the network, storage, and compute infrastructure and has now added support for (FCoE) Multi-Hop.
Speaking to CBR about the new developments Paul D’Cruz, head of data centre technical strategy, Cisco UK&I, said the company had been using Unified Fabric for its own data centre consolidation efforts and has seen a CapEx saving of around 45%, a reduction in cabling of around 66% and a 57% decrease in power consumption. He claimed customers could achieve similar savings by using this technology. "It makes sense to build toward one single fabric in the data centre," he told CBR. "This stretches across the entire data centre, from server to storage."
