With these innovations, Cisco reinforces its commitment to precisely integrating Unified Fabric, Unified Computing, and Unified Network Services into a single, comprehensive fabric for the data center; this innovative approach allows any application to be distributed easily, scalably, and securely across any location (within the data center itself, between different data centers, or in the cloud).

Cisco's data center fabric facilitates converged network management and enables single-cable communication between servers and storage arrays in both physical and virtual data center environments. This intelligent fabric can independently connect multiple data centers and cloud services, providing greater infrastructure flexibility, operational simplicity, and investment protection.

Key features of the
Unified Fabric announcement: the power of a complete converged network.
Optimized flexibility with the Cisco Nexus 5548UP and Nexus 5596UP switches. Thanks to Unified Port (UP) capability on all ports of these new devices, IT managers can provision any switch port with any of the following technologies: 1 Gb Ethernet, 10 Gb Ethernet, Fibre Channel (2/4/8 Gb), or FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), simplifying configuration and providing maximum flexibility during deployments to adapt to data center needs. The new 48- and 96-port switches are ready for Unified Fabric, support Layers 2 and 3, and are compliant with the IEEE 802.1Qbh standard.

Cisco Nexus 3000 Ultra-Low Latency Switches. The new Nexus 3000 series switches offer industry-leading latency of less than one microsecond port-to-port in a high-density 10 Gb Ethernet model for specialized segments such as financial exchange applications, where the lowest possible latency is paramount. With a one-unit rack design, the new switch supports Layer 2/3 wired switching and a wide range of routing protocols on the NX-OS operating system.

Fabric Extender technology to increase scalability and simplify data center management. As a pioneering, standards-based industry innovation, Cisco Fabric Extender (FEX) technology enables organizations to build a single, modular fabric that extends from Cisco Nexus switches to Cisco Unified Computing System servers, adapters, and virtual machines. With increased flexibility, reduced cabling, and simplified management, more than 5,000 customers who have deployed the Cisco FEX architecture have achieved savings of over 50 percent in equipment and operating costs. Today’s announcement includes three new products, all based on the latest IEEE 802.1Qbh standard: FEX Adapter, VM-FEX, and FEX Support for the Nexus 7000 Series.

The FEX Adapter allows intelligent bandwidth segmentation to optimize the use of existing Network Interface Card resources transparently to applications. The FEX Adapter facilitates secure and scalable network monitoring and server I/O (Input/Output) management through a single point of administration provided by the Nexus access layer switch.

VM-FEX extends the switching fabric all the way to the server's virtualization hypervisor. By facilitating the switching of virtual machine traffic on the same hardware, Cisco enables IT managers to consolidate physical and virtual access layers and achieve greater performance. With VM-FEX, the Nexus switch provides a single point of management for the entire fabric, reaching down to the virtual machines.

Support for FEX Adapters in the Nexus 7000 family with the Nexus 2232PP 10GE Fabric Extender provides the industry's highest density 10 Gb Ethernet solution for top-of-rack deployments, offering a single point of management for up to 1,500 ports per chassis.

Director-class multi-hop Fibre Channel over Ethernet. Cisco Unified Fabric unifies storage and data center networks to provide a single, scalable, high-performance, and highly available network. With this announcement, Cisco facilitates complete data center convergence, encompassing everything from servers to storage, by including new director-class multi-hop Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) functionality in the Nexus 7000 switching platform and the MDS 9500 series (for storage arrays), in addition to the existing FCoE capability in the Nexus 5000 family. Leveraging the industry's largest offering of standards-based FCoE switches, Cisco extends Unified Fabric support to both the access and core layers of the network, enabling all types of storage traffic (Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI, and NAS) over a simplified infrastructure based on lossless 10-Gigabit Ethernet technology.

End-to-end management with Cisco Data Center Network Manager. The new Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) enables server and SAN/LAN administrators to comprehensively manage converged data center networks spanning up to 150,000 ports, and strengthens integration with VMware vCenter to optimize provisioning, performance, and troubleshooting.

Scaling the Internet and enabling cloud services with LISP and MPLS on the Nexus 7000 platform. The Nexus 7000 family offers the most comprehensive consolidation and virtualization feature set on the market, supporting both Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Location/ID Separation Protocol (LISP). LISP is an innovative IP routing and addressing architecture pioneered by Cisco to enable IT directors to deploy truly agile networks that facilitate mobile work, cloud adoption, the transition to IPv6, and multi-tenant scalability.

Cisco Data Center Portfolio Enhancements:
Cisco has introduced new products and features that optimize its data center portfolio while protecting existing infrastructure investments. New additions to the Catalyst 6500 switch family include: a new ACE30 module for dynamically scalable workloads using Overlay Transport Virtualization technology, which increases application delivery performance by 54 percent; a new ES40 module with 40 Gigabit line-rate performance for high-performance data center interconnects; and a new ASA Services module that offers integrated firewall and security services.

The new MDS 9000 Storage Media Encryption fabric service provides secure media encryption for both disks and tapes, thus meeting regulatory security requirements without the need to reconfigure the SAN network.

The Nexus 1010 is an NX-OS-based device for hosting virtual services. This platform now supports two additional services: Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG), which provides virtual machine-level segmentation in a multi-tenant virtualized data center, and Cisco Data Center Network Management Center (DCNM).

The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) platform offers nine different models.
The Cisco Unified Computing System unifies computing, networking, storage access, and virtualization resources into a single system, reducing the total cost of ownership and increasing agility for all types of data centers, virtualized or not. With over 4,000 customers, this innovative platform based on a unified fabric has garnered excellent recognition and acceptance from the industry. In this regard, the latest Gartner report, "Fabric Computing as the Preferred Infrastructure for Virtualization and Cloud Computing," reveals all the key aspects of this emerging technological trend.

Cisco has expanded its Unified Computing System portfolio with the innovative C260 M2 rack server, ideal for resource-intensive applications. This new model incorporates Cisco Extended Memory technology, which doubles the memory capacity of conventional two-socket servers. The company also introduced new versions of the UCS B230 M2, B440 M2, and C460 models; all of which deliver enhanced virtualization performance while reducing latency through the latest generation of Intel Xeon processors, known as Westmere EX.

End-to-end management with Cisco NX-OS.
Designed to facilitate the evolution to cloud computing environments, the Cisco NX-OS data center operating system provides high availability, supports a unified fabric fabric, optimizes virtualization, simplifies operations, and offers a platform for innovation while protecting existing technology investments. Spanning networking, compute, and storage, Cisco NX-OS now adds support for multihop Fibre Channel over Ethernet, an industry-first capability that enables multiple management points to increase the scalability of unified fabrics.

Expanding the ISV Partner Ecosystem:
Partners and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have already developed more than 10,000 applications supported by the UCS platform through the system's openly offered Application Programming Interface (API). Cisco Unified Computing System is an ideal platform for the agile, on-demand deployment of IT resources. For example, the UCS API allows cloud management software to quickly reconfigure compute, network, and storage access functions as business needs change. A list of ISVs that support the Cisco Unified Computing System API can be found on the Cisco ISV Partner Page.

As Luis Palacios, Business Development Director for Data Center and Virtualization in the Mediterranean region of Cisco, points out, “Cisco’s innovative strategy based on convergence through unified fabric provides end-to-end visibility of the data center, encompassing everything from the network to storage and virtual machines, thus helping to reduce complexity and total cost of ownership and optimize workload management and security in cloud computing environments.”.

For his part, Jack Sepple, Global Managing Director for Accenture and Cisco Business Group at Accenture, emphasizes that “through our strategic alliance with Cisco, we have designed a suite of joint data center solutions that combine Cisco’s advanced technology with Accenture’s expertise in specific segments. We are committed to helping users implement these joint solutions on Cisco’s new unified fabric technologies to facilitate the adoption of a much more agile data center.”.

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