Cisco Adds 40GbE, 100GbE Support to Catalyst, Nexus Switches

The proliferation of cloud services, mobility on demand and Gigabit Ethernet has taxed data center environments to the point where many companies are experiencing serious drags on their network. But Cisco Systems is looking to “eliminate many of the choke points before they become choke points,” by adding 40GbE and 100GbE support to two of its most popular switches.

“Many of the new trends we’re seeing in computing are having a ripple effect across the entire IT landscape,” said Shashi Kiran, senior director of marketing for Cisco’s Data Center and Enterprise Switching Solutions. “10 Gigabit proliferation in particular is having an impact on the rest of environment.”

With that in mind, Cisco is adding 40GbE and 100GbE support to its Nexus switching platform and 40GE support to its Catalyst switching platform — two technologies popular with Cisco’s channel partners.

“Adding such capabilities really introduces new business opportunities in the data center,” said Wenceslao Lada, VP of Worldwide Channels, Cisco Borderless Network. Such opportunities not only enable partners to go deeper with new and existing customers as they upgrade their networks to accommodate increasingly bandwidth-hungry traffic, but also to add value-added services to their offerings and move more into solutions-selling, he said.

Being upgraded are the Catalyst 6500 campus network switch line, which will support 40GbE, and the Nexus 7000 data center switch  line, which will support both 40GbE and 100GbE.

Along with the new support, Cisco also announced Easy Virtual Network, technology that provides “simpler network virtualization functionality” for the Catalyst 6500 and 4500 and Aggregation Services Router 1000 line, according to the company. Also announced was a new Nexus 1010-X appliance for the data center, offering scalable virtual services.

“A lot of these megatrends are hitting the IT environment at the same time,” Kiran said. “[IT] can’t adopt a Band-Aid approach to fixing. Here at Cisco, we recognized we need to take a long-term view and see what we could do to address this convergence in a much more holistic way. A lot of our [product] roadmaps are coordinated so our global customers are able to address in as homogenous a way as possible.”

The enhancements to the Catalyst and Nexus switches are slated for availability in the second quarter/April 2012 timeframe.