Cisco's Nexus brings SAN, LAN together

The data center is the new center of Cisco's universe. The nexus, if you will. This week Cisco introduced a data center switch that has already been called its most important product introduction since fill-in-the-blank.

Cisco's Nexus 7000 sounds like it should be a high-tech shampoo or something out of Star Trek. But it is actually, according to Cisco, a "flagship data center-class switching platform combining Ethernet, IP, and storage capabilities across one unified network fabric." In other words, it represents the true convergence of the SAN and the LAN into one "data center" network.

Network World's Jim Duffy has all the details of the Nexus 7000 in his story.

One telling detail is that Cisco created a "new" operating system for the switch, NX-OS, which combines elements from the company's SAN-OS and the IOS found in routers and switches. It can handle Layer 2 switching, Layer 3 routing and advanced virtualization. It is focused on minimizing downtime, allowing for "zero-service-disruption system upgrades" and self-diagnostic capabilities to detect the failure of processes and restart them without service disruption.

The Nexus 7000 will be the first Cisco platform to use the company's Trusted Security architecture introduced last month. The company says this will enable identity- and role-based security across data centers. There will be wire-rate AES-128 encryption on every port.

The "flagship" moniker implies that there are more models coming in the "Cisco Nexus Family," and that they too will employ the unified fabric architecture that will give all servers access to all network and storage resources. This unified fabric means no more separate SAN - and it also means that Cisco is looking to build on this for the future.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.