Cisco Unveils Nexus 5000 Series

Cisco on Tuesday unveiled the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series of data center-class switches.

The company said the product builds on its commitment to invest heavily over the next 18 months in new products and capabilities to help customers architect the next-generation data center, creating a new market opportunity for its channel partners.

The development of the Nexus 5000 Series was a collaborative effort between Cisco and Nuova Systems. Cisco also said it will acquire the remaining interest that it does not yet hold in San Jose, Calif.-based Nuova Systems, a Cisco-invested start up focused on the development of next-generation products for the data center market.

The Cisco Nexus 5000 Series is designed for data center consolidation with investment protection. With a unified fabric, IT organizations can simplify cabling infrastructure, reduce the number of required adapters, lower costs, and reduce power consumption and their carbon footprint.

The platform delivers line-rate, low-latency, 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching, as well as input/output (I/O) consolidation solution via support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), data center Ethernet and virtualization technologies. The company said with its support for FCoE, the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series consolidates LAN, fibre channel and iSCSI-based storage-area networks (SANs) and server cluster traffic onto an Ethernet-based unified fabric.

The Cisco Nexus 5000 platform can connect to either Cisco Nexus 7000 or Cisco Catalyst 6500 in the aggregation/core layers of the data center.

Partners helping to create an end-to-end unified fabric solution with the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series iclude 3PAR Data, APC, Broadcom, Dell, EMC, Emulex, Intel, NetApp, Netxen, Panduit, QLogic, Scalent and VMware.

The Cisco Nexus 5000 Series starts at $36,000 for the fixed configuration 40-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch and is scheduled to be available in May.

Check back with xchange on Wednesday for more details.

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