It's hard to overstate how important the Nexus data-center switching platform,
set to be unveiled Monday, is to Cisco
Systems: for the dominant networking vendor's enterprise business, it's
the biggest thing since the Catalyst 6000, which made its debut in 1999, according
to the two key executives on the project.

At a dinner with press last week, they compared it to the CRS-1 (Carrier Routing
System), a huge switch for the core of carrier networks that Cisco rolled out
in 2004. To bring that platform to life, the company developed a new version
of its flagship IOS (Internetworking Operating System) software and engineered
the hardware to scale up to 92T bps (bits per second) of throughput. The core
of the Internet is Cisco's turf, and it wasn't willing to give any ground to
upstarts.

The Nexus brings Cisco into not just a new territory for its business, but
a new product category: a unified switch that spans storage and computing in
data centers and has security built in. Given the stakes, superlatives are natural.

- A single Nexus chassis will be able to handle more than 15T bps of traffic
ripping through a data center, up from just 2T bps for a current Catalyst 6500
switch.

- At that rate, the switch could run 5 million concurrent transcontinental
conferencing sessions using Cisco's TelePresence Collaboration system. It could
also copy the entire searchable Internet in 7.5 minutes.

- One interface module for the Nexus 7000 chassis will come with 32 10G bps
ports, and the platform is designed to support future interfaces including 100G
bps.

- The company spent about $250 million on research and development for the
new platform, and at its peak, the Nexus R&D team numbered more than 500
engineers, according to Tom Edsall, senior vice president and chief technology
officer of Cisco's Data Center Business Unit.

As with the Catalyst 6000 Series and the CRS-1, Cisco developed the Nexus with
an eye to long-term needs. Where the CRS marked the debut of IOS XR, the first
modular version of IOS, the Nexus will have Cisco's first OS that can be fully
virtualized, called NX-OS. The Nexus will also break new ground with its lossless
switching fabric, a departure from traditional Ethernet -- though backward compatible
with it, Cisco said.

The system also represents a gamble on FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet),
a still-emerging standard for sending traditional Fibre Channel storage network
traffic over Ethernet. Though the new standard will probably succeed with the
backing of Cisco and other big vendors, the installed base of Fibre Channel
is huge, said Yankee
Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. There will be a proving period for Ethernet
as a reliable, lossless data center transport, he said.

Cisco expects the uptake of the new platform to take time, just as it did with
the CRS. The first Nexus product will go on sale in the second quarter of this
year, and in the first year Cisco expects to see mostly trials of the new system,
said Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco's data center group. Deployments
will probably start to pick up in the second, third and fourth years after the
introduction, she said.

But just as the opportunity was huge for the CRS, as video and other traffic
rose fast on carrier networks, the chance to capture next-generation data centers
is likely to justify Cisco's efforts on the Nexus line. Web-based services and
applications, as well as outsourced computing offerings from Amazon.com and
other companies, are powering the growth of massive data centers. Microsoft's
MSN division is a test customer of the Nexus, said Ullal. Asked whether the
mighty Google would buy in as well, Ullal said, "I would hope so."

IDG News Service

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