It’s arduous to overstate how vital the Cisco Nexus data-center switching platform, set to be unveiled Monday, is to Cisco Systems: for the dominant networking vendor’s enterprise business, it is the biggest factor since the Catalyst 6000, that created its debut in 1999, in line with the 2 key executives on the project.
At a dinner with press last week, they compared it to the CRS-1 (Carrier Routing System), a large switch for the core of carrier networks that Cisco rolled out in 2004. To bring that platform to life, the corporate developed a brand new version of its flagship IOS (Internetworking Operating System) software and designed the hardware to scale up to 92Tbps of throughput. The core of the net is Cisco’s turf, and it wasn’t willing to grant any ground to upstarts. Continue reading “Cisco’s Nexus is a big deal”