Cisco's second Nexus

Cisco this week introduced a second data center switch, the Nexus 5000, a follow-on to the company's Nexus 7000 introduced in January. There - now you can call it a switch "family."

To create stronger bonds in this family, Cisco simultaneously announced that it is purchasing the 20% of Nuova Systems it did not already own, a move that was expected quite some time ago and raises the question of why Cisco didn't just buy the whole company in the first place. Network World's Jim Duffy has details of the transaction.

The Nuova acquisition also raises speculation about what Mario Mazzola's role at Cisco might become, in time. Mazzola had been a bright star at Cisco - what will his return mean?

Meanwhile, the Nexus 5000 is now available for your consideration, or at least it will be, when it ships next month.

The switch builds on the Nexus 7000's mission of bringing the SAN and the LAN together into a single data center network. The Nexus 5000 starts at $36,000 for a fixed-configuration 40-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch.

It supports Fibre Channel over Ethernet - consolidating LAN, server cluster, Fibre Channel and iSCSI-based SAN traffic onto Ethernet. It can connect to both the Catalyst 6500 LAN switch and the MDS 9000 storage switch.

Service provider Savvis is testing the new switch, though it's not yet saying whether it is buying it. Apparently Savvis is very interested in the whole concept of a unified switch fabric, however.