Terabit Power – Meet the Nexus 7000

SecurityDude, CISSP-ISSAP is an IT consultant, Security & Privacy Advocate and blogger at large with over 20 years IT experience. SecurityDude shares tips, tricks, and info that the average networking professional will find interesting and indispensable.

In a previous posting Imagining Terabit Networks, Steve Brown challenges us to think of the applications made possible by Terabit speeds.  Cisco Systems can make your Terabit dreams come true now.

Are you making your move to 10Gb Ethernet to keep up with exploding demand for bandwidth?  Is your current infrastructure inadequate?  As Al Pacino famously said in the movie Scarface, “Say hello to my little friend“.

Meet Cisco’s new packet monster, the Nexus 7000.  It is a 10Gb aggregation switch for the data center with a whopping 15Tb switch fabric.  Yes, that is a “T” after the 15.

The 10-slot Nexus 7000 can support 512 10Gb ports (though there would clearly be oversubscription at that port density).  A base switch reportedly starts at just over $75,000.00.  You may be in for a collosal electric bill too.  The 7000 supports up to three 6KW power supplies for a total of 18,000 Watts!

If all the Nexus could do is move Terabits of data per second, it would be an impressive switch.  But in addition to today’s 10Gb Ethernet, the 7000 will be upgradable to 40Gb & 100Gb Ethernet interfaces when those technologies become shipping product.

It is also noteworthy that the Nexus 7000 is designed to provide a “unified fabric” for Ethernet and Fibre Channel.  The Unified Fabricis maybe 12-18 months away, but the NX-OS was derived from the SAN-OS of Cisco’s very successful MDS9000 series Fibre Channel Directorsand Switches.  Even if Unified Fabric is vaporware at the moment, I have no doubt Cisco will deliver the goods.

One of the most impressive features of the currently shipping 7000 is Service Virtualization.  A single Nexus can be partitioned into Virtual Device Groups (VDCs).  The VDCs offer additional levels of reliability and flexible provisioning.  If there is a fault in a VDC, it does not affect any other VDC.  There is complete hardware and software isolation.

So what could you do with all this power?  Cisco provides some examples:

• Transmit the data for all U.S. academic research libraries–estimated at over 2,000 terabytes of data–in 1.07 seconds.
• Copy the entire Wikipedia database in 10 milliseconds.
• Copy the entire searchable Internet in 7.5 Minutes.
• Download all 90,000 Netflix movies in 38.4 seconds.
• Send a high-resolution 2 megapixel photo to everyone on earth in 28 minutes.

Tags: 10 Gb, 10Gb, cisco, network, nexus, nexus 7000, Terabit