Whether we’re at home or in the office, the truth is that all customers want choices. No one wants to be told they can only use one type of DVD player because it is the only one compatible with their television, and the same holds true in the enterprise.  In talking with our customers, we know that they want best-in-breed products. They want to know that whatever product they choose, it will work together seamlessly with their legacy devices to deliver uninterrupted access to the data center. That doesn’t seem unreasonable, does it?

I think that having choices is important – after all, who knows your data center better than you do? So, in keeping with my focus of listening to our customers, I am  excited to share with you that just like our Fabric Extender (FEX) collaboration last year with HP, we have most recently brought the FEX technology to the Fujitsu PRIMERGY blade chassis, giving joint customers an opportunity to further simplify data center access operations and improve productivity. The PRIMERGY Ethernet FEX, also know as the Cisco Nexus B22F, extends the Cisco Unified Fabric into the Fujitsu PRIMERGY Blade Chassis and offers operational simplicity at scale with a single point of management and policy enforcement.

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Tags: Cisco, data center, fabric, fex, Fujitsu, unified

“Boiled frog syndrome” refers to a fable that when you put a frog in hot water, it jumps out.  However if you slowly heat up the water the frog is in, the frog will cook.

The number of features and associated CLI for networking equipment has increased gradually over the last 15+ years.  Each feature is valuable in its own right, but the weight of all CLIs, all OSs, and all variations of deployment cannot be internalized by any human.  The result: the concept of the über-CCIE is cooked.

The question is what displaces the CLI over time?  It is argued by “good enough” network vendors that this complexity isn’t necessary.  But considering most networking costs are operational costs, this argument can generally be discarded.

More articulate arguments are made by people who want to simplify overall network operations activities versus concentrating upon enhancements to CLI.   Businesses don’t want to manage individual boxes; they would love to shed this complexity.  Instead they would rather express their operational intents to their network, and let the network itself sort any box specific details.

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Tags: Autonomic, CLI, fex, OpenFlow, SDN

Our latest TechWiseTV episode is all about the recent announcements rolling out from the Data Center team. We did our best to cram a few handpicked things we liked and give you the detail we thought it deserved.  The theme, and the show title: Evolutionary Fabric, Revolutionary Scale.

The announcements include the most scalable 10 Gigabit Ethernet Layer 2/Layer 3 Fabric in the industry.  The claim is that no matter how diverse your data center demands may be, Cisco offers unparalleled abilities to arm you with efficiency, agility, innovation and differentiation.  So no matter your form factor, physical, virtual or cloud- based environments are all positively impacted with an industry leading fabric-based approach.

Filled with geeky goodness….look at what you will find!

• 2nd gen Nexus 7000 with revolutionary new scale
• FabricPath, Adapter FEX, and VM FEX support on Nexus 5500
• New FEX switch and B22 OEM program
• Expansions to Nexus 3000 family
• IN YOUR FACE COMPETITIVE!  Don’t miss the final segment of the show…Jimmy Ray calls out HP, Juniper, Arista….”I showed you mine, now show me yours!”

Watch the entire thing after the jump.

Tags: 2000, 5000, 5500, 7000, 7009, adapter fex, arista, b22, blade, cloud, data center, DC, extender, f2, fabric, Fabric Path, fabric2, FabricPath, fex, HP, nexus, NX-OS, nxos, scale, techwisetc, VM-FEX