From the how many releases can you make in a week files:
Cisco is a big company and they sure have a whole bunch of news this week (coming out of both RSA and the Cisco partner conference in Hawaii).
The Nexus product line was first announced earlier this year with the Nexus 7000 switching platform. The new Nexus 5000 that is being announced today fills outs the product line with another chassis (and price point). The Nexus 5000 is available with a fixed configuration 40-port 10GbE switch. As was the case with the Nexus 7000, the new 5000 is powered by the Cisco NX-OS operating system, which includes elements of Cisco’s IOS and SAN-OS operating systems.
The Nexus 5000 itself was actually developed in partnership with Nuova Systems — which until today was a Cisco funded startup. As part of the Nexus 5000 roll out Cisco has also acquired the final 20 percent of Nuova that it did not own. Cisco noted in a press release that that they had already invested $70 million into Nuova.
The real push from Cisco with the Nexus is to create a unified fabric
(with Ethernet at the core) for all data center traffic. It’s a great
idea and one whose time has certainly come.
