Cisco unveils new datacenter innovations at San Diego partner summit

Next generation data center switches deliver cloud services at cloud scale with cloud economics; Industry’s first end-to-end hyper-converged solution offers agility, flexibility and simplicity.

Cisco announced data center technology innovations in three key areas: networking, hyper-converged infrastructure, and hybrid cloud orchestration which will enable application-centric hybrid cloud deployments. Cisco continues to lead data center innovation with SDN-ready Nexus switches that deliver cloud scale 10/25/40/50/100Gpbs, with up to 10 times performance improvement at industry leading price points.

The new switching platforms provide the scale, telemetry, security, and performance needed for distributed containers and micro-services, as well as the loss-less traffic needed for IP storage and hyper-converged infrastructure.
The new switches give Cisco customers a two-year innovation advantage over competitive technology. Cisco also unveiled Cisco HyperFlex Systems, built on Cisco’s industry-leading UCS compute platform, which brings a new architectural approach to hyper-converged infrastructure. Cisco HyperFlex Systems simplify policy-based automation across network, compute and storage for the widest set of enterprise applications. Cisco HyperFlex surpasses first generation hyper-converged solutions, which were severely limited in terms of the performance, flexibility, and operational simplicity required by today’s IT environment of micro-services, containers, new applications and clouds. This expands Cisco’s portfolio of-complete software-defined infrastructure – from compute with UCS, network with ACI and SDN solutions, to now HyperFlex for storage.

These announcements are the first of many hardware and software innovations Cisco is rolling out in 2016. The goal is to help customers achieve secure, highly simplified, scalable and cost effective data centers that keep pace with the speed of business, and accelerate adoption of hybrid cloud environments.

Based on Cisco’s award winning UCS technology, Cisco HyperfFlex Systems represent the next generation in hyper-converged infrastructure with a leap in technology that delivers the industry’s first complete end-to-end hyper-converged solution. The HyperFlex portfolio extends Cisco’s UCS and converged infrastructure businesses, which together have over 50,000 customers worldwide. The HyperFlex series makes an ideal platform for customers deploying enterprise applications in their data centers, and for remote and branch offices where hyper-converged infrastructure is expected to become a multi-billion industry over the next three to four years.

Cisco Next Generation Nexus Switches and Software: Speed and Telemetry Cisco’s ASIC innovations power its next generation switches, enabling customers for the first time to transition to 25/50/100Gbps at the cost and density of today’s 10/40GGbps networks, with an increase of up to 10 times bandwidth.
The new Cisco Nexus Fabric Manager automates the complete fabric life-cycle management with a simple point-and-click web interface, and offers automated configuration snapshots and rollbacks. Nexus Fabric Manager builds and self-manages a VXLAN-based fabric, dynamically configuring switches based on simplified user-based actions. An IT manager can fully deploy a VXLAN-based fabric in just three steps, complete with zero touch provisioning, and can upgrade all fabric switches to a new software release in only four mouse clicks.

“Our business demands high bandwidth and over 180 petabytes of storage for our customers,” said Arslan Munir, Director of Cloud Engineering, Shutterfly. “The new Cisco Nexus 9200 switch promises to solve our current demands with speeds of up to 100Gbps. With this as our foundation, we can successfully sustain the ever-changing and increasing needs of our users while continuing to innovate. This allows us to offer new and better services without compromising the customer experience, which is crucial to our business. Plus, through automation, we can achieve faster, zero-touch provisioning, saving us three to four person-hours each time a switch or router is provisioned.”

“I’m looking forward to the new Nexus 9000 platforms because the 9200, 9300-EX and 9500 platforms will enable us as a university to deal with all the traffic generated by the students in a very efficient way,” said David Schrok, Network engineer, Avans University of Applied Sciences.
"The new Nexus 9200 and 9300-EX platforms will enable us to stay ahead of the competition with 10/25/40/50G for the access and 40/50/100G in the core,” said Peter Elbertse, Managing Director, PPRO’s Hosting Provider, Netherlands.
“The Cisco Nexus 9200 is a next-generation Top of Rack switch that pushes the boundaries and exceeds performance of existing solutions,” said Trey Layton, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, VCE, the Converged Platforms Division of EMC.

“These switches meet the needs for the dense, hyper-converged compute and IO intensive applications that VCE VxRack Systems address. For example, it’s not uncommon for customers with hundreds or thousands of VxRack nodes to drive millions of IOPS, as well as hundreds of gigabits per second of system bandwidth. The Cisco Nexus 9200 solves this problem.”
Cisco’s hardware and software innovations will help IT organizations to accelerate the adoption of the hybrid cloud environments that will fulfill their business needs today and into the future..

Expanded ACI Ecosystem Cisco is expanding its ACI ecosystem with several technology pioneers: Infoblox, which automates network configuration and change; N3N, which extends ACI visibility beyond the network to the entire data center; Tufin, which provides visibility, control and security change orchestration across heterogeneous environments; vArmour, which provides application-aware micro-segmentation with advanced security analytics; and Veritas, which collects, protects, analyzes and optimizes customers’ global data.

In addition, Cisco also welcomes several technology innovators to the ACI ecosystem which are taking advantage of ACI automation through its open REST APIs to deliver hyper-agile application deployment, security, governance and cloud operations.
The new solutions provide Cisco channel partners with an expanded end-to-end data center portfolio to better serve their customers. “Cisco’s new data center and cloud solutions will enable our partners to help their customers as they evolve to application-centric data center infrastructure and also address the requirements for DevOps and application developers,” said Ken Trombetta, Vice President, Global Partner Organization, Cisco. “We believe this will expand the opportunity for new revenue streams and professional services for Cisco partners.”