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Cisco unveils datacenter blade switch 'Nexus 4000'
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 30 September 2009, 17:49 IST
Bangalore: Cisco has unveiled a blade addition (Nexus 4000) to its Nexus line of datacenter switches that is designed to aggregate multiple physical x86 blade servers from various vendors into a 10G Ethernet fabric.
The Nexus 4000 is the first blade switch in the Nexus line, which also includes the Nexus 7000 core switch, the 5000 top-of-rack switch, the 2000 fabric extender and the 1000V software-based virtual switch. Nexus 4000 is intended to fit inside a blade server system enclosure and aggregate multiple 1G server NIC connections into a 10G pipe for connection to and from the Nexus 5000 and 7000 top-of-rack and core switches.
The Nexus 4000 supports the same NX-OS converged LAN/SAN operating system as the rest of the Nexus family, and Cisco's MDS SAN switch line. This is intended to provide consistency across the datacenter as well as scale, high availability, fault tolerance and uniform management.
The Nexus 4000 supports FibreChannel and FibreChannel over Ethernet, and IP-based iSCSI or Network Attached Storage over Ethernet datacenter, bridging specifications for converged LAN and storage access from the server. It features a specialized ASIC for low latency and lossless operation in a virtualized environment.
The Nexus 4000 will be sold to Cisco's OEM customers who will rebrand it and sell to end users. The company expects its existing base of catalyst blade switch OEMs to purchase the new Nexus blade switch.
Since it is being developed for blade server vendors, Cisco says it will leave product details, availability and pricing up to those particular vendors. The new switch will compete with HP's new 6120XG and 6120G/XG blade switches, and 6- and 10-port BNT switches from Blade Network Technologies, which are resold by IBM.