Coming Soon: The Cisco Blade Server? - GigaOM
23 March, 2008 by Greg Ferro Print Posting
Coming Soon: The Cisco Blade Server? - GigaOM: “”
I am not only one who thinks that the Nexus 7000 is a footprint to scare off competitors. Scroll down to the part
“While many in the industry saw this announcement as playing catch-up to the likes of Force10 in the data center switching market”
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This post suggests you see the Nexus 7000 as an equivalent or “me too” to Force10? Or did I misunderstand?
At any rate, the Nexus is a complete technology leap past the likes of Force10, Extreme, and Foundry in that Cisco Nexus 7000 provides a highly scalable and highly available lossless Ethernet fabric. With Nexus, Cisco customers will be able to unify their LAN and SAN I/O in the Data Center with 10GE for many reasons such as cost savings operational efficiencies.
The Cisco competitors mentioned above will never be able to offer this architecture vision with their current offerings.
Cheers,
Brad
To some extent. I can see the future for Nexus 7000 will probably be just fine. Not overwhelming, not revolutionary, just the next step in performance and functions. Add that to the momentum that Cisco can push into the product, it will be quite successful. No doubt I will use extensively and willingly so.
But to paint it as revolutionary or a “technology leap” is a distortion of reality. Force10 have more or less (no point is haggling over fine details) had most of the capability for years, other vendors have had some or all the features in play for a while. An the C6500 platform is definitely ageing gracefully, but still aged.
Watching Cisco putting some support into FCOE isn’t a “brave new world” given that they are accompanied by Intel, HP, IBM and every other big data centre player.
I see Cisco as catching up to some extent, and adding a bit more to make sure that we know they are fighting for business and the thought space. The old single train of IOS has now fragmented into multiple software bases (IOS XR, IOS XE, IOS SX, NXOS, and so on).
I mean, come on, combining LAN and SAN is obvious. Crowing about the obvious is not convincing.
And yes, if Cisco hadn’t made this announcement about now, many people would have been concerned that there was no progression. Whether they would have moved away from Cisco, we will never know. I’ll also bet that Cisco makes sure we never have to find out be releasing products as needed.
“Force10 have more or less (no point is haggling over fine details) had most of the capability for years”
What capability would that be? 10GE switching? Nothing exciting there. Cisco by the way was the first company to ship a 10GE switch port.
Which company will be the first to ship a FCoE capable switchport? Cisco.
If that counts for “playing catch up”, Im’ confused.