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Brad Hedlund is a Systems Engineer at Cisco Systems in the U.S. Enterprise Sales Organization and is the editor of Internetwork Expert.ORG. Brad has 12 years experience in Enterprise IT networking and has been CCIE certified for 8 years - CCIE #5530 (Routing and Switching). In August 2007, Brad received recognition as a "Top Engineer" at Cisco.

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A few words about Nexus 7000

March 30th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

If you are not familiar with the innovation in Cisco Nexus 7000 it’s easy to just dismiss it as “Cisco’s answer to Force10″. The reality is, the Nexus 7000 is much more than just a “me too” 10-gig switch to compete with likes of Force10, Foundry, Extreme, and others — Nexus is a complete technology leap beyond what any other switch vendor has to offer today.

Let’s hit on some of the many points that make Nexus 7000 unique and why this switch is in a league of its own…

  • Nexus 7000 is the first switch to deliver a LOSSLESS Ethernet Fabric with Virtual Output Queueing (VOQ) and Central Arbitration that guarantee no frames will be lost entering the switch fabric. Can Force-10, Foundry, Extreme, and Juniper say the same? NO!.
    Why a lossless ethernet fabric? Data Center server I/O consolidation — The next major architectural transformation in the Data Center.
  • Investment Protection. Nexus 7000 is designed to deliver 500+ Gbps per slot and beyond with future fabric cards — no forklift upgrades. Other vendors will ask you to buy a whole new chassis and linecards to get you to that kind of bandwidth.
  • High Availability. Because Nexus was designed to deliver I/O consolidation (Fiber Channel over Ethernet), high availability was built into every aspect of the switch design from grid redundant power supplies, stateful hitless supervisor failover, In Service Software Upgrades (ISSU), to a self healing OS that recognizes failed processes and repairs itself without user intervention.
  • Virtualization. A single Nexus switch can be carved into multiple logical switches with unique and isolated control and data planes instances. Why virtualization? Infrastructure consolidation across organizational and business unit boundaries

The fact is, Nexus 7000 is not just another 10-Gig switch. Nexus is a platform that will transform the Data Center as we know it. Nexus 7000 is in a much different league than what any other switch vendor has to offer today and is a product of Cisco’s leadership in Data Center innovation and transformation.

http://www.cisco.com/go/nexus

Nexus 7000

There Are 8 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Will on 14 April 2008:

    All flames and kudos aside… it sure is an ugly beast compared to a Force10 E1200!

  2. Comment by Joe Harris on 2 May 2008:

    Will, your aesthetical taste scares me :-) Let’s let the readers decide, here is a picture of a Force10 E1200:

    http://www.force10networks.com/company/image_gallery/eseries/E1200-lg1.jpg

    and here is a picture of a Cisco Nexus 7000:

    http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/switches/ps9441/ps9402/product_large_photo.jpg

    The cable management section of the Force10 looks like an extremely bad hair day compared to that of the Nexus…

  3. Comment by Brad Hedlund on 8 May 2008:

    Thanks Joe. Ugh, that Force10 really is an ugly switch. The logo on the cable management tray sorta looks like “Force0″. And it looks as if the switch is saying … “I really wish someone would acquire me, please, anybody?” :-)

  4. Comment by Darby Weaver on 11 May 2008:

    Which came first? Looks like somebody borrowed someone else’s chassis design to me.

    When do the lawsuits start?

  5. Comment by Cavalier Poodle on 6 June 2008:

    Twin-ax SFP+ has already been released for Nexus 5000, but why can’t
    it be used with Nexus 7000? I hope the next software release solves it, though.

  6. Comment by Brad Hedlund on 6 June 2008:

    Max distance on SFP+ Twinax is 10 meters. It would be difficult to get a large population of servers within 10 meters of a Nexus 7000. Piece of cake with Nexus 5000 however because it is a Top of Rack switch. The majority of deployments where servers are connecting directly to Nexus 7000 will be done via fiber where the Nexus 7000 sits at the end or middle in a row of server cabinets.

  7. Comment by Scott Schweitzer on 13 June 2008:

    One could easily do 496 servers with 10M Twinax cables, but using Myricom’s 21U 512-port switch configured with 496 SFP+ 10GbE ports. Six 42U racks on each side of the networking rack all loaded with 1U servers would be a piece of cake.

    Given that we also sell a 640-port 21U 10G Edge switch we could configure Twinax between computers and the Edge switches and fiber between Edges and multiple centralized 512-port Core switches the limit of 10M on Twinax is manageable. Actually up to 8,192 computers it’s pretty easy, after that it takes a little thought!

  8. Comment by Brad Hedlund on 14 June 2008:

    Lets not confuse what is possible, with what is practical.

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