Cisco continues to drive data centre innovation

The centralized policy-driven automation of the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), application profiles and Nexus 9000 switches combine to help organizations build highly secure cloud networks and hybrid clouds. Cisco also announced an addition to the Nexus 3000 family: the new Nexus 3164Q switch designed for the demanding workloads of massively scalable data centers (MSDC) and big data. Building on the programmability offerings of the Cisco 9000 portfolio, the Nexus 3164Q supports widest range of automation tools for Cloud providers including Linux Container support, XML, JSON, Puppet/Chef, Python, and OpenStack. Cisco Nexus 3000 switches power eight of the 10 leading cloud providers’ networks covering the majority of their footprint. The announcements come as Cisco celebrates the fifth anniversary of its highly successful Unified Computing System (UCS) ™.

According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index, nearly two-thirds of all workloads will be processed in the cloud by 2017, and over two-thirds of all data center traffic will come from the cloud. Companies building enterprise private clouds, public clouds and hybrid clouds need policy-based automation to optimize their cloud deployments and gain the most efficiency. ACI is the first data center and cloud solution to offer full network automation, visibility, security at scale, and integrated management of both physical and virtual networked IT resources, all built around the needs of applications.

du, a leading integrated telecommunications service provider in the United Arab Emirates and the fastest growing operator in the Middle East, is consolidating several data facilities into two next generation data centers designed to host new cloud services. “We selected Cisco’s Nexus 9000 series switches and Application Centric Infrastructure as the foundation for our new data centers because the solution will streamline our operational processes and reduce operating expenses for power, cooling and cabling,” said Saleem Al Balooshi, Executive Vice President - Network Development & Operations, du. “We particularly like the Cisco bi-directional optics which gives us four times the 40GE density as well as upgrades to 100Gb using the same cabling infrastructure, thereby removing the necessity for costly fibre upgrades.”

At 10,000 Cisco Networking Academies in 165 countries, every year hundreds of thousands of IT Professionals worldwide gain the skills to build, design, and maintain networks and prepare for industry-recognized certifications. Cisco continues to lead the way with an expanded curriculum that prepares systems, network and security professionals for the new private, hybrid and public cloud models. “Through automation and programmability embedded within our NX-OS platforms, training, support, and certifications, we are empowering over two million networking engineers and thousands of channel partners worldwide to enable our enterprise, commercial, service provider and cloud customers to expand their skill sets while embracing on-premise private and hybrid cloud models with ACI in the data center and across the Access and WAN,” said Soni Jiandani, SVP, Cisco. “Cisco is driving opportunities for our partners to build their practices and enable customers a smooth journey to the cloud.”

Together with the Cisco Nexus 9508, the Cisco Nexus 9504 and Nexus 9516 switches provide the industry’s most scalable, programmable, energy-efficient and high-performance data center switch portfolio, designed to address cloud, big data, and complex applications. Independent testing by Miercom demonstrated that the Nexus 9500 series platform provides industry- leading performance, density, and reliability. “Applications such as high performance computing, high frequency trading, Big Data, and cloud computing place higher demands on network infrastructure,” said Rob Smithers, CEO of Miercom. “For those networks, high port density, high throughput, low latency, low jitter, and high performance consistency are critical and must be rigorously tested. The Nexus 9500 family has raised the bar in the industry by scoring best overall in benchmark tests, and by demonstrating massive scalability. The Cisco Nexus 9516 proved in test not to drop a single packet at line rate with the largest scale 576 x 40GE review conducted in the industry.”

The Nexus 9500 portfolio includes system innovations such as the industry’s first backplane-free modular switch with 15 percent more efficient power and cooling, and a simpler design with 30 percent of the components to improve mean time between failures with 2.8 times higher reliability. The switch portfolio also provides chassis flexibility for cost-effective 1/10G access designs, 10G/40G aggregation designs, and high-performance 40G and future 100G leaf-spine designs.
· With 576 wire-speed 40 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 60 Tbps throughput, the Nexus 9516 is the industry’s highest density wire rate switch, removing barriers to scale and simplifying network design. The Nexus 916 was selected as a finalist in the data center category for a 2014 Best of Interop award.

· The Nexus 9504 provides a cost effective option to solve migration from core-aggregation-access to spine leaf architectures. With the Nexus 9504 partners now have new engagement options for customers seeking lower density aggregation and access designs.

The new Nexus 3164Q switch, designed for the most demanding workloads, is an ultra-dense, high performance switch that delivers flexible connectivity for either 40 Gigabit or 10 Gigabits ports (up to 256 10Gigabit ports) in a 2 RU and a rich NX-OS feature set. The Nexus 3164Q offers seamless mobility with workload isolation, wire rate layer 2/layer 3 switching, and enhanced programmability options.

New Cisco Specialist Certifications: are being developed specifically for network programmability job roles. Cisco training and certification programs will develop specific skills for each job role:
· Business Application Developer: gain awareness of the new open data center environment
· Designer, or Architect: achieve capability of integrating application
· Engineer: integrate and troubleshoot in a programmable cloud environment
· Developer: use programmatic interfaces for network automation including JSON, XML, Python, Puppet/Chef, and OpenStack.
Cisco Consulting Services: deliver measurable business gains in faster deployment time, reduced infrastructure costs, and acceleration to revenue. New services designed for ACI deployments include:
· Cisco Readiness Planning: identifies risks and opportunities, provides operational analysis, and delivers detailed migration plans for smooth successful transitions to ACI.
· Cisco Quick Start Service for Nexus 9000: assistance to help deploy Cisco Nexus 9000 series switches.
· Cisco Accelerated Deployment Services for Nexus 9000: support rapid transition to an application-centric architecture.