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Top 5 Ways the Cisco Nexus Switches will Revolutionize the Datacenter - Part 2
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.png "Christopher Stacy")
In the previous installment of “The Top 5 Ways the Cisco Nexus Switches will Revolutionize the Datacenter,” we covered the native Fibre Channel integration that is offered by the Nexus switches. In this article we continue the discussion with number 4 on the list: Unsurpassed Power and Performance.
Number 4: Unsurpassed Power and Performance
The Cisco Nexus series is best represented today by Cisco’s flagship Nexus chassis, the Nexus 7000. This monster of a switch was specifically designed to function as a core switch in a large datacenter hierarchy. The combination of increasingly more common Gigabit (and even 10 Gigabit) connectivity to servers, combined with the rapid expansion of many datacenter facilities means that the venerable Catalyst 6500 platform is rapidly losing its place as the king of the datacenter infrastructure. The Cat 6500 is still a capable platform, and will remain in many datacenter networks for a long time to come, but many industry-leaders (including Cisco) see its role shifting over time from a powerful core switching platform to more of an edge services provider. The core switching responsibilities will fall to the Nexus 7000, which potentially offers performance at an order of magnitude greater than any other Cisco switch chassis.
The Chassis
The key to the Nexus 7000’s superior performance is the chassis itself. As it ships today, the Nexus 7000 includes a backplane capable of switching at up to 1.2 Terabits per second (480 million packets per second), almost double the system switching capability of the fastest Catalyst switch to date. The future vision of the 7000 chassis is to ultimately house a backplane capable of an astounding 4.1 Terabits per second with the existing fabric modules, and to give it the capacity to potentially upgrade to as much as 15 Terabits per second or more.
Line Cards
The huge amount of system bandwidth available on the Nexus 7000 is complemented by high speed, high density line cards offering (at release) either a 32-port 10 gigabit Ethernet module (utilizing an 80 Gigabit connection to the backplane) or a 48-port Gigabit Ethernet module (utilizing 40 Gigabit to the backplane). This allows a single Nexus 7000 chassis to provide up to 256 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, or 384 Gigabit Ethernet ports.
Supervisor Engine
The massive amount of system bandwidth and high speed ports available on the 7000 is also complemented by an all new high- performance supervisor engine designed specifically for the Nexus series. The improved supervisor engine allows for complete redundancy between 2 installed supervisors with one active and one hot standby module. This also provides the Nexus chassis with the capability to hot-swap between supervisors. The most unique aspect of this design is that it is now possible to perform an in-place, transparent upgrade of the supervisor engines.
Conclusion
With all of the power that the Nexus 7000 switch brings to bear, it is easy to see why it will rapidly become the core of many datacenter networks. As more servers are moved into datacenter facilities, and as these systems require increasingly large amounts of bandwidth; the need for a next-generation core switching platform will increase exponentially. Offering unrivaled performance and capabilities, the Nexus 7000 is poised to fill this role for some time to come.
Stay tuned for our third installment, as we continue with the 5 ways the Nexus switches will revolutionize the datacenter.
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