News

posted on 09 April 2008 08:52

Cisco has introduced a new FCOE-supporting data centre switch, the Nexus 5000, and bid to buy the company it collaborated with in developing the switch, Nuova Systems.

The Nexus 5000 is a multi-protocol data centre switch that supports FCoE, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, as well as Fibre Channel (FC) itself. This means it can act to link data centre compute and networking resources direct to FC storage area network (SAN) fabric directors and switches, such as Cisco's MDS 9000 range.

By supporting Ethernet directly as well, specifically 10GigE, and also FCoE the Nexus 5000 can link servers on a LAN to Fibre Channel SANs without the need for those servers to have dedicated Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) and intervening FC fabric switches. Cisco, in common with other SAN and network vendors views FCoE as the penultimate step in migrating storage networking protocols onto Ethernet, destined to become the single unified data centre network. (Goodbye InfiniBand too.)

The switch also supports iSCSI and will support Data Centre Ethernet, a coming version of Ethernet with more predictable and reliable packet transmission characteristics.

Nuouva Systems is 80 percent owned by Cisco and counts several Cisco executives amongst its staff, such as CTO Ed Bugnion whom Cisco credits with founding VMware. In effect Cisco helped some of its executives and engineers go off and found a new company, using existing Cisco technology and has now 'spun-in' the resulting business.

The Nexus 5000 is the first of several products from Nuova, which has 200 employees and was founded in 2006.

Cisco says that the Nexus 5000 supports virtualisation in that it can respond to VMware requests to assign resources from shared pools of compute, storage and network resources.

Supportive statements have been by 3PAR, Broadcom. Dell, EMC, Emulex, Intel, NetApp, Panduit, QLogic and VMWare as Cisco's ecosystem swung into action.

Brocade and Intel will work on FCoE, and QLogic and NetApp, have demonstrated it, and also demonstrated 8Gbit/s FC access direct to a drive array.

Brocade with its DCX data centre switch now has stronger competition as the first Cisco data centre switch, the Nexus 7000, did not support Fibre Channel directly. With the Nexus 5000 theoretically capable of connecting to the installed base of CNT, McData and Brocade FC switches and directors, Cisco now has a much stronger marketing appeal to customers using them.

Why the Blade Runner allusion? In the Ridley Scott cyberpunk film the Nexus was a limited life-span replicant human and Harrison Ford played a Blade Runner, a man who would retire them. Cisco wants to retire Fibre Channel and the Nexus 5000 is its Blade Runner.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}