At the ongoing Cisco Live 2013, the networking major announced its data center strategies to address challenges in the Cloud era.
Cisco’s newly developed data center networking architecture is aimed at CIOs to better address the demands of new and current applications in the cloud era.
As part of data center strategies, Cisco added two enhancements to its Unified Fabric portfolio.
Cisco says Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA), which automates network provisioning, simplifies fabric management and optimizes fabric for greater efficiency and scale.
Addition of new Nexus 7700 Series switches and F3 Series I/O Modules that deliver 40G/100G scalability is the second enhancement.
Cisco’s Application-centric infrastructure
As per the application-centric infrastructure, Cisco says, application deployment time will be reduced via fully automated and programmatic network infrastructure.
Moreover, the architecture will provide complete integration across physical and virtual applications normalizing endpoint access while delivering flexibility of software and performance, scale and visibility of hardware across multi-vendor virtualized, bare metal, distributed scale out and cloud applications.
Cisco believes that a balanced approach provides a faster rate of innovation and customer adoption while enabling a future proofed migration to Application Centric Infrastructure. This approach results in optimized price, performance, density, security and power while providing investment protection for existing cabling plants through innovation in the area of optics. As customers migrate to 40G today and 100G in the future, this approach allows them to optimize both their capital and operational expenditures.
Cisco’s focus on Nexus 7700 Series switches
Cisco says the new F3 series I/O modules, which are supported on both 7000 and 7700 Series switches, deliver 40G/100G density, improve power efficiency by 60 percent, and support a broad set of proven Data Center Switching features.
Cisco’s Nexus 7718 delivers 40G and 100G switch with up to 384 40-Gbps ports and 192 100-Gbps ports. In addition, the Nexus 7718 is designed to deliver up to 83Tbps of overall switching capacity.
The company will ship the new Nexus 7700 Series switches in July 2013 and the new F3 Series I/O modules are scheduled to be available in the second half of 2013.
Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA) Innovations
According to Cisco, optimized spine-leaf topologies with enhanced forwarding, distributed control plane and integrated physical and virtual enable network with seamless mobility for physical and virtual machines and network extensibility. It offers better resiliency with smaller failure domains and multi-tenant scale of greater than 10,000 tenants/networks.
