Bloglines | My Feeds (2175) (1)

Bloglines | My Feeds (2175) (1): "What strikes me from reading the Nexus specs and that of the associated NX-OS operating system is how this new switch reminds me of an old mainframe. Nearly all services are virtualized, with multiple copies of the OS starting and stopping as needed. Everything is redundant, isolated, and intended for nonstop service. It is hard to imagine when, if ever, you'd even need to reboot. And while the Nexus supports network connections up to 10 gigabits per second, the really fast networking takes place in parallel between cards over a passive backplane. The Nexus 7000 is a data center in a rack, only with dramatically reduced cooling and power requirements which suggest to me that Cisco has a growth strategy for this architecture that will, over time, make it look more and more like a big computer and less like a router. Throw on a virtualized AIX or Solaris and the Nexus will eventually reveal that its true competition is less likely to be Juniper than it is IBM, HP, and Sun."