Nexus 7000 Series from Cisco

Yesterday, Cisco announced a data center switching platform named “Nexus 7000 Series”. This launch comes after DCX Backbone was released by Brocade.

The Nexus 7000 is designed as highly scalable, robust and off modular platform. It can  deliver up to 15 terabits per second of switching capacity in a single chassis, supporting up to 512 10 Gbps Ethernet and future delivery of 40- and 100-Gbps Ethernet.

Nexus 7000 Series is powered by the advanced operating system “NX-OS”. NX-OS combines the best of Cisco’s SAN-OS, Layer 2 switching, Layer 3 routing protocols, and advanced virtualization capabilities into one reliable operating system with the familiar Cisco IOS interface.

Nexus 700 Series also supports Cisco’s TrustSec for a trusted traffic to ensure the data integrity using AES-128 encryption on every port of Nexus 7000. And Nexus 7000 is fully compatible VFrame DC. Cisco’s Data Center Network Manager can pickup the Nexus 7000 series to manage the data center networks.

Virtualized Storage for SMBs from EMC and Dell

EMC introduced a new variant of CLARiion yesterday. EMC calls the new system the AX4, and Dell brands it as AX4-5.  

The variant, AX4 can scale from 3 terabytes of capacity to 60 terabytes. It supports SATA and SAS mix and match up to the count of 60 drives in total. This new array is targeted for SMB and available in entry and advanced configurations. iSCSI and FC interfaces are supported for both the entry and advanced configurations. The Entry level configuration can scale up to 10 hosts while the Advanced Configuration can be scaled up to 64 hosts. 

AX4 is designed to integrate with VMware and features high availability and reliability. It features a mirrored cache design, built-in standby power supply, continuous disk consistency checking and hot-swappable components to help ensure availability and reliability of the data.  

It also includes Virtual LUN technology which can be used in conjunction with VMWare’s Storage VMotion to enable non distruptive storage migration. In addition, the CLARiiON AX4 supports EMC’s leading replication software, including EMC MirrorView, EMC SAN Copy, EMC RepliStor and EMC Replication Manager to provide the highest levels of uptime in VMware environments.  The CLARiiON AX4 has been certified by VMware and will be included in the VMware Storage/SAN Compatibility Guide.

AX4 may be integrated with XenSource virtualization and Microsoft’s HyperV in near future.