Cisco Nexus Reaches Another Impressive Milestone through Continued Innovation Delivery

Cisco recently announced a major customer milestone in our data center portfolio with the news that the Unified Computing System topped more than 60,000 active customers, from literally zero in 2009. Other parts of our data center portfolio are doing just as well as we discussed in our most recent earnings call where we announced fast growth of Nexus 9000 customers that brings us to a total of more than 12,000 customers strong.

We added almost 1,200 new Nexus 9K customers in the quarter, bringing the total installed base to 12,000.  Our APIC adoption continues to increase rapidly with over 380 new ACI customers in Q3, bringing our total to nearly 3,500.

The impressive growth in the Cisco data center portfolio is strong validation of the trust customers place in our ability to both innovate and execute, even as data center trends are rapidly evolving across the vectors of application models, users, and locations. Our customers recognize that the Nexus 9K is a foundational element of that portfolio, featuring proven high performance and density, low latency, and exceptional power efficiency that are must-have features for their modern data centers.

To capitalize on this momentum and to provide customers with more choice, Cisco is expanding the Nexus 9000 fixed-configuration options with the introduction of two new Nexus 9300 fixed switches based on Cloud Scale ASIC. This advanced chip technology keeps our customers years ahead, or perhaps light years ahead as the world-champion Dubs might put it. Cloud Scale ASICs provide our customers an innovation advantage in terms of application performance, pervasive visibility, and security and truly sets Nexus 9000 apart in a crowded data center switching marketplace.

The two new Nexus 9300 models are:

Cisco Nexus 9364C ACI Spine Switch: Features 64-port fixed 40/100 QSFP and 2 fixed 1/10 SFP+   available in ACI mode with NX-OS support coming later this year. This model is for spine deployments in the enterprise, service provider, large virtualized, and cloud environments. The Cisco Nexus 9364C ACI Spine Switch is a 2-rack-unit (2RU) switch that supports Layer 2 and 3 non-blocking with aggregate 12.8 Tbps of bandwidth, 16 ports of MACSEC capable hardware, and efficient handling of high-performance data center traffic for business-critical apps.

Cisco Nexus 9348GC-FXP: Features 48 ports of 100Mbps or 1Gbps, supports both ACI and NX-OS mode, and is best suited for customers that require a Gigabit Ethernet ToR switch with local switching. This switch is ideal for customers with big data usage with minimal data center footprint. This switch offers up to 48 1Gbps copper downlink ports that can be configured to work as 100Mbps or 1Gbps ports. The four SFP28 optical ports also can be configured as 10/25Gbps while the two QSFP28 ports can be configured as 40- and 100-Gbps ports.

Cisco Nexus 9300 Deployment Scenarios

Similar to other Nexus 9000 switches, these switches offer high degrees of architectural flexibility and can be deployed in three models:

in NX-OS-based stand-alone mode as a programmable network,

in VXLAN/EVPN-based programmable fabric,

in highly automated ACI mode, delivering automated policy-based systems management

This combination of the Nexus ACI spine switch along with Nexus 9300 leaf nodes form the infrastructure heart of an automated and policy-driven ACI architecture. The new Cisco Nexus 9364C Switch offers advanced scalability in the smallest spine switch form factor and enables connectivity to up-to 64 Cisco Nexus 9300 leaf switches with its high port density of 64 40/100 GbE ports and 12.8 Tbps throughput.

These two new switches build on other recent Nexus 9300 successes namely the availability of N9K-C93180YC-FX and N9K-C93108TC-FX models that established several innovation benchmarks including:

Being the first and only switch in the market with integrated encryption (MACSEC) capabilities

Bolstering high-performance reliability through support for 25Gbps RS-Forward Error Correction

Multiprotocol storage networking with support for 8/16/32G Fibre Channel enabled on each 25Gbps SFP+ ports

Summary

Customers will choose vendors who can deliver a dynamic data center infrastructure that is easy to manage, affordable and flexible is required to meet the needs of resource-constrained IT professionals in large or small companies. More than 12000 Cisco customers now understand the Cisco Nexus 9000 offers flexible options for their different use cases and high-performance scale that supports continued growth. With the two new Nexus 9300 switches, Cisco has added two more weapons in our data center arsenal to take on the most challenging customer environments.

For more info:
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/switches/nexus-9348gc-fxp-switch/index.html
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/switches/nexus-9364c-switch/index.html

Tony Antony
Sr. Marketing Manager