I’m writing this post the week after Cisco Live was held in London. I did not attend Cisco Live, but this morning I attended a Cisco event today titled entitled Fabric Innovations for the World of Many Clouds. It was kicked off by Cisco’s Chief Strategy Officer Padmasree Warrior who outlined the Fabric vision of the company at this time, which is summarized in the figure below.

The Nexus 6000 is a new product line with a super high 10/40 Gbps port density and hovering at 1.2 microsecond port-to-port latency. Available today, the 4RU Nexus 6004 has 48x40Gbps ports along with 4 expansion modules allowing for a total of up to 96x40Gbps ports. Also announced, but available in Q2, is the Nexus 6001 – a 1RU switch with 48x1Gx10G with 4x10G/40G uplinks.  Senior VP of Cisco’s Data Center Business Unit, David Yen, said that even Cisco could avail of merchant silicon, but that they still backed their own custom silicon to deliver lower port-to-port latencies, as seen in their Algo Boost technology. To give you an idea on how low 1.2 microseconds is in the industry, Arista has been boasting low-latency switches as low as 350 nanoseconds port-to-port for several years. But Cisco already has an answer for Arista’s ultra-low latency switches – the Nexus 3548 which boast port-to-port latencies as low as 190 nanoseconds. These are better suited for financial exchanges where low switching latencies are critical for conducting electronic trades.

Cisco claims it can scale the Nexus 6004’s 1.2 microsecond latency for as many as 1,500 10G ports. The number 1500 is attained when the Nexus 6004 is combined with another new product – the Nexus 2248PQ Fabric Extender. The last-named product can support 1500 GE or 10GE server ports through Cisco’s FEX technology. Assuming 50 VMs per server, this means that the 1500 FEX ports can support up to 75,000 VMs. This is an impressive number and shows the scalability of the Nexus 6000 platform.

The Network Analysis Module (NAM) has also now formally made its foray into the Nexus offering. I worked a lot with the first two generations of the NAM in 2004 and was impressed by its robustness (one of the few products at the time to be built on Linux) and ease of use. Of course, that was with the Catalyst 6500 platform, which was defribilliated a couple of years ago with the Supervisor 2T. It seems that Cisco is now finally bringing service modules onto the Nexus platform.

The second major announcement was the Nexus 1000V InterCloud for connecting enterprise clouds to provider clouds in a secure manner. The highlights are making application migrations incredibly simple without having to convert VM formats, create templates, deploy site-to-site tunnels between clouds, or re-configure network policies. The Nexus 1000V IC is intended to automate all these steps and support all hypervisors. It is managed by Virtual Network Management Center (VNMC) InterCloud. The highlight of that (to me) was that it hooks into cloud orchestration systems like Cloupia (Cisco’s recent acquisition) and Cisco’s own Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) via a northbound API. Hybrid cloud deployment solutions are a relatively new area and I will be following how this pans out with great interest.

I was most keen about the third announcement, which was of Cisco’s ONE Controller. Last year Cisco announced onePK, but there was no product. Now finally, there is the Controller. It features northbound APIs, such as REST and OSGI and southbound APIs, such as OpenFlow and Cisco’s own onePK. Cisco also announced a roadmap for the ONE Controller’s compatibility with Cisco’s existing Nexus and Catalyst product line.

More information is available from the following links:

Introducing Nexus 6000 Series
Cisco Launches Nexus 1000V InterCloud Part I
Cisco Launches Nexus 1000V InterCloud Part II