Solution Brief

Transform Your
Data Center
with Cisco’s Nexus
Switching Portfolio
Transform Your Data Center with Solution Brief

Cisco’s Nexus Switching Portfolio

The data center is the heart of the network, delivering business agility
and promoting IT transformation. As your business evolves and you
look toward new technologies and applications to grow the business,
the data center switching architecture that underpins the delivery of
enterprise-wide applications and services must provide the scalability,
convergence, and intelligence that will enable your business to thrive.
The Cisco Nexus Family of Data Center switches, part of Cisco’s Unified
Fabric, provides you with industry leading products and innovations that
enable you to transform your data center through key capabilities that
create a simpler, smarter, more scalable and resilient network.

Delivering Architectural Flexibility and Choice

Data center functionality, space, and architectures can differ from business to business
and even from location to location. The Cisco Nexus® family of data center switches
provides a comprehensive product portfolio that can be deployed at the aggregation,
core, top of rack, middle, or end of row and as an embedded virtual switch integrated
into your server hypervisor. By delivering a flexible architecture we address the
“The converged Ethernet requirements of various designs, cabling, and environmental requirements.
and SAN networks reduced
The Power of Cisco NX-OS Software Innovations
our upfront capital outlay by Cisco® NX-OS Software, a proven, purpose-built data center operating system,
50 percent, or $600,000, provides you with an intelligent and scalable network operating system that offers
when compared to our continuous availability and sets the standard for mission-critical environments.
Cisco NX-OS Software delivers exceptional operational flexibility through a single
previous architecture.”
operating system that is also used on the Cisco MDS 9000 family of storage
switches and the Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects of the Cisco Unified
Derek Masseth
Computing System™ for consistent operations across physical, virtualized, and
Senior Director for Infrastructure
converged environments. This allows you to implement a single operating system
Services, University of Arizona
across network, storage, and compute infrastructures, thus simplifying data center
operations, resulting in a positive effect on operational costs.

Industry-Leading Network Convergence

The Cisco Nexus family of data center switches allows you to build an infrastructure
that allows you to decrease your total cost of ownership through the simplification
of your data center architecture. Through the convergence of the LAN and storage
networks, Cisco’s Nexus portfolio delivers a high-performance, highly scalable,
lossless solution that can carry Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet,
iSCSI, and NAS traffic. This allows you to reduce the number of devices you manage
and maintain, reduce your cabling requirements, and deliver efficient resource
utilization leading to lower power and cooling costs.

2 © 2012 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Partner Confidential Information.
Transform Your Data Center with Solution Brief

Cisco’s Nexus Switching Portfolio

Delivering Scalability with Simplicity “With any other design,

The Cisco Nexus family of data center switches offers multi dimensional scalability
we would have spent
for the data center network in switch performance, system scale and geographic
span allowing your data center to support more servers and more applications US$1.3 million for copper
when you need them. Cisco Fabric Extender (FEX) Technology enables network cabling, overhead racks,
fabric extension, with a single point of management on the access switches across and patch panels. With
large number of ports, thereby delivering operational flexibility with simplified
management. The Nexus portfolio also offers high density Gigabit or 10 Gigabit
the Cisco Nexus family,
high-density Gigabit or 10 Gigabit Ethernet future-proofed solution that can cabling cost $190,000, an
scale to 40/100 Gigabit Ethernet. This, when combined with our award-winning 85 percent savings. The
technologies such as Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV), Locator/ID Separation money we saved paid for
Protocol (LISP), and FabricPath, enables you to transparently extend the network
to encompass all network locations into a single extended environment, allowing the Cisco Nexus equipment
resources to be efficiently accessed and effectively utilized regardless of size or implementation.”
scope without the need of more complex and inefficient technologies such as
spanning tree. Mike Shandraw
Enterprise Data Center Manager
St. Joseph Health System

“Cisco products have

three major technical
advantages... they can
Virtualization-aware Networking deliver virtualization
The Cisco Nexus family of switches delivers virtualization-aware capabilities that functions… can support
allow you to fully utilize the power of a virtualized environment beyond traditional
connectivity. Through secure, policy-based workload mobility within and across
10 Gigabit Ethernet ports,
geographically dispersed data centers through OTV, LISP, and Nexus 1000V the highest density in the
technologies, you can provide on-demand application workloads to users that retain industry, provide high
their network and security policies across a highly scalable flat Layer 2 domain.
availability through ISSU.”
Consistent Networking across Physical, Virtual and Cloud
The Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch and a suite of virtual service nodes Yasuyuki Asai
provide functional and operational consistency across physical, virtual and cloud A specialist in the Infrastructure
Modernization Department, ICT Services
environments. The Nexus 1000V brings the network edge to the virtual machine
Division, Nihon Unysis, LTD
within the application server, running the NX-OS operating environment with a fully
functional control plane to mirror the functional capabilities of Nexus physical switches.

3 © 2012 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Partner Confidential Information.
“Our collaboration with From a security perspective, the ASA 1000V Cloud Firewall provides equivalent
security services and policy management to the ASA portfolio of data center security
Cisco gives us a roadmap appliances, including virtual private network (VPN), intrusion prevention (IPS), and
to move forward with our network address translation (NAT) capabilities. The Nexus 1000V portfolio and virtual
data center evolution. It service nodes, including the Nexus 1010 virtual services appliance, also preserves
means that we have the operational roles and responsibilities by ensuring networking teams access and
manage the virtual network polices and security policies, and can deploy new services
scalability and advanced VM’s in application servers or dedicated service appliances.
technology necessary to
succeed today and in the Continuous Data Center Operations
Beyond network-based availability, the combination of the Cisco Nexus hardware
future.” architecture redundancy and the Cisco NX-OS process modularity and self-healing
capabilities, you can take full advantage of a highly available architecture with zero
Sanzio Bassini service disruption. Through our ability to ensure continuous up-time for planned
Director of Systems and Technology or unplanned maintenance, upgrades, and software certification, and through key
Cineca technologies such as Cisco’s In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU) capabilities, you
can quickly integrate new features, enhancements, and problem fixes providing you
with a solution that makes zero-effect operations a reality.

An Evolutionary Approach to Transformation

With the Cisco Nexus portfolio of data center switches, you don’t have to worry
about losing the existing infrastructure and operational investments you’ve already
made in the data center. Cisco Nexus offers transparent integration with the Cisco
Catalyst® switching portfolio as it shares a common management interface that
allows your network architects to easily integrate a Cisco Catalyst and Cisco Nexus
solution, delivering operational consistency and minimal requirements for staff
training, ensuring your investments are protected.

Learn More
With the Cisco Nexus family of data center switches, you can enable your data
center to become a center of innovation, nonstop application delivery, and revenue
generation that can extend beyond geographical boundaries through a solution that
offers a simpler, smarter, more scalable and resilient architecture today.

To learn more about:

• Cisco Nexus family of data center switches, go to

www.cisco.com/go/nexus

• Cisco Unified Fabric go to:

www.cisco.com/go/unifiedfabric

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© 2012 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Partner Confidential Information. C22-704189-00  04/12