Cisco revamps data centre switches

security and network convergence upgrades to its line of data centre switches - the Nexus series and MDS 9500 switch family, reports Computerworld.

Bob Nusbaum, product line manager for Cisco Storage Solutions, explains that network administrators can now channel network-attached storage, iSCSI, fibre channel and Ethernet-based local area network traffic over the same network.

Sys-con states that Cisco integrated its unified fabric, unified computing, and unified network services into a data centre fabric designed to be simple, scalable and highly secure.

This is part of the company's strategy to deliver any application across any location, within and across data centres or moved to the cloud.

According to Cisco, its unified data centre fabric enables converged network management and agility from the server to the storage array for both physical and virtualised environments.

The company claims that the data centre design flexibility, reduced cabling infrastructure, and simplified management have resulted in equipment and operational savings of up to 50% for the more than 5 000 customers who have deployed the Cisco FEX architecture, says CIOL.

According to Enterprise Networking Planet, Omar Sultan, senior manager for data centre architecture at Cisco, says: "We're in a different point in our lifecycle than a lot of our competitors that only have a single rack switch and are still building out their vision.

“We're actually at the point now where we're rolling out second-generation platforms and we're starting to roll out platforms for very specific user cases."