Cisco Ushers In Application-Centric Infrastructure

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A look at the Cisco Nexus 7700 10-port switch, part of Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) architecture. (Photo: Cisco)

At Cisco Live in Orlando this week Cisco (CSCO) unveiled its data center networking architecture, designed to usher in the era of Application-Centric Infrastructure. The architecture, assisted by Cisco's majority owned subsidiary Insieme Networks, aims to transform data centers to better address the demands of new and current applications in the Cloud era.

Application Centric Infrastructure

The shift to application-centric infrastructure will provide IT with the ability to quickly deliver business applications to end-users with a simpler operational model, scalable secure infrastructure, and at optimized cost. With this architecture application deployment time is reduced with the help of automated and programmatic network infrastructure, and it delivers a common open platform across physical and virtual applications. It will also feature a holistic simplified approach with the integration of infrastructure, services, and security, coupled with real-time telemetry and extensibility to future services. The architecture will also have a comprehensive set of published, open APIs, and allow customers to migrate to 40G today and 100G in the future - to optimize both capital and operational expenditures.

Dynamic Fabric Automation and Nexus expansion

Cisco announced updates to its Nexus portfolio, evolving the Unified Fabric with simplified provisioning, better management, and new switches. Cisco Prime DCNM 7.0 includes open APIs and centralized fabric management with automated network provisioning, common point of fabric access, and host, network and tenant visibility. Optimized spine-leaf topologies with enhanced forwarding, distributed control plane and integrated physical and virtual, and delivers greater resiliency with smaller failure domains and multi-tenant scale of greater than 10,000 tenants/networks.

Cisco launched new Nexus 7700 Series switches and new F3 Series I/O Modules. The new F3 series I/O modules, which are supported on both 7000 and 7700 Series switches, deliver 40G/100G density, improve power efficiency by 60%, and support a broad set of proven Data Center Switching features. The new Nexus 7718 delivers high capacity 40G and 100G switch with up to 384 40-Gbps ports and 192 100-Gbps ports. The Nexus 7718 has been designed to deliver up to 83Tbps of overall switching capacity.