Cisco's End-to-End Data Center Fabric Announcement
Winning combination of comprehensive coverage and integration
By joltsik on Thu, 10/20/11 - 3:37pm.In the past, Cisco trickled out new product announcements so as not to water down the impact of each component. Not anymore. This week, Cisco announced a multitude of new products and functionality across the Nexus product line.
From my perspective, Cisco's announcement should get a lot of attention from competitors and, more importantly, customers because:
1. It positions Cisco as a one-stop-shop. While Cisco didn't mention UCS specifically, it highlighted all of the data center connectivity including virtual switches, fabric interconnects, top-of-rack and aggregation/core switches. In other words, Cisco is presenting a data center architecture -- not just switches or some type of stand-alone network fabric.
2. Cisco is banking on network operations and security integration. Yeah I know that these were Cisco weaknesses in the past but I give Cisco credit for recognizing and addressing these issues. Cisco is committed to developing automation and strong security functionality to support tens of thousands of virtual and physical servers.
3. Cisco is addressing the scale and performance gap. In my view, Cisco has become vulnerable on two fronts: price and performance. Much of the pricing pressure has come from HP but Cisco has also seen vendors like Arista, Force 10 (now Dell) and Juniper sneak into its base with high performance, low latency, and massive scale. Between the Nexus 3000 ultra low latency switch and the new Nexus 7000/5500 (up to 12k servers at 10GbE), Cisco wants to become competitive for any application performance or data center scaling requirement.
Cisco may not have the "hot box" in all areas of networking but it is aggressively closing any remaining gaps. Combining this with its UCS, a comprehensive (virtual edge to data center edge) portfolio, and network management/security integration will make CIOs think long and hard before replacing Cisco with an alternative vendor.
Moving forward, end-to-end architecture wins at large enterprises and Cisco's architecture is looking pretty darn strong.
- About Networking Nuggets and Security Snippets
- Jon Oltsik is a principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group responsible for the networking and security services at ESG. Prior to joining ESG, Jon was the founder and principal of Hype-Free Consulting. Mr. Oltsik previously served as VP of Marketing & Strategy at GiantLoop Network where he managed all marketing activities and defined the company’s strategic vision. Jon was also a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research where he covered a wide range of infrastructure and IT topics. In this role, he was frequently quoted in business journals, including the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and the New York Times, and was also the recipient of a prestigious "best research" award for his breakthrough report, "The Internet Computing Voyage."
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