WHY YOU’LL WANT THIS SWITCH, PART 1
As I Google "Cisco Nexus" and look through the articles, it is a rare article that doesn’t mention the "15 terabit" number within the first couple of sentences. I can certainly understand this because its a sexy number and its an easy way to quantify the engineering goodness baked into this platform. But, to be honest, if, after spending all this time, money and effort on a new platform, all we could talk about was speeds and feeds, it would be a little sad.
Ironically, the reason I think folks will want a Nexus are a couple of areas that have not gotten much press so far. The first of these "secret weapons" is NX-OS, which has actually been a source of some trepidation. So, first off, "new" is a bit of a misnomer. What we did was start with the proverbial clean sheet and design an OS explicitly for the data center. We had the latitude and R&D capability to cherry-pick from the Cisco technology pantry and build from scratch as appropriate. So, we chose SAN-OS, which has been running for over 4 years in some of the most demanding enterprise data centers out there, as the foundation. Likewise, our layer 3 code, from our Procket acquisition, has been deployed with several major service providers for a number of years. Finally, our layer 2 code was written with the same team that made the Catalyst so successful.
As you can see, we took a very modular approach to building the OS, which is one of the reasons we can successfully integrate these components. In fact, I believe that the fact that NX-OS is a extremely granular and modular OS built atop a secured Linux kernel will appeal to the vast majority of customers. If offers a number of advantages in terms of flexibility, stability and extensibility that other folks will be hard pressed to meet. And, by the way, we wrapped all this in an IOS-like CLI so ramp-up time for staff is minimal. OK, I’m a bit biased, but I think we have hit the mark in terms of giving you operational and functional consistency with the existing Catalyst family, while also giving you an OS that will grow with you the next decade or so.
But we’re not done yet. The framework of NX-OS also allows us to break new ground in terms features and functionality. One of the coolest new features are Virtual Device Contexts (yes, the engineers named this one). The NX-OS brings hypervisor-like functionality to the Nexus, so you can deploy multiple virtual switches on a single physical platform. This lets you support multiple environments on a single switch, say dev and production, or different lines of business with different business polices. VDCs also allow you to segment your environment to keep your security and compliance folks happy. In short, VDCs allow you to drive higher return out of your investment through more efficient utilization and greater flexibility.
That’s about it for now—you can go to http://www.cisco.com/go/nxos for more details. Next time, I’ll dig into exactly what “zero service disruption†means.
Posted by Omar Sultan at 02:22PM PST
henrybb Feb 21, 2008
So If I want to buy a switch for my data center, which platform is more suitable to me ? 6509 with vss or Nexus 7000 ?
I hate STP,so vss can get rid of it. How about Nexus ？
thanksï¼