The Transition to 10 Gigabit Ethernet Unified Networking: Cisco and Intel Lead the Way

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e Transition to 10 Gigabit Ethernet Unied Networking: Cisco and Intel Lead the Way
Cisco Unified Fabric
Cisco Unied Fabric provides a key
building block for both traditional and
virtualized data centers that helps unify
storage and data networking to deliver
seamless convergence and scalability
with reduced total cost of ownership and
faster return on investment. It provides
the exibility of high-performance,
highly available networks to serve diverse
data centers needs including the lossless
requirements to carry storage trac
(FC, FCoE, iSCSI, NAS) over Ethernet.
Oering the best of both LAN and SAN
worlds, Cisco Unied Fabric enables
storage network users to take advantage
of the economy of scale, robust vendor
community and aggressive roadmap
of Ethernet while providing high-
performance, lossless characteristics of a
Fibre Channel storage network.
Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches
e Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches,
including the new Cisco Nexus 5500
platform was the rst open-standards-
based access-layer switch to support I/O
consolidation at the rack level through
FCoE. More information can be found
by visiting http://www.cisco.com/go/
nexus5000.
Rich Feature Sets
e rich feature sets of the Cisco Nexus
5000 Series Switches make them well suited
for data center access-layer applications.
ey help protect the investment in
data center racks with standards-based
10 Gigabit Ethernet and FCoE features
and virtual machine awareness features
that allow IT departments to consolidate
networks based on their own requirements
and timing. e combination of higher
port density, lossless Ethernet, wire-
speed performance, and very low latency
makes the Nexus 5000 switch series well
suited for meeting the growing demand
for 10 Gigabit Ethernet that can support
a common Ethernet-based fabric in
enterprise and service provider data centers,
protecting enterprises’ investments.
Investment Protection
e Cisco Nexus 5000 Series supports
consolidated I/O using FCoE on downlinks
to servers. FCoE is Fibre Channel
and, as such, has familiar methods of
conguration, operation, and management.
On the uplinks to the network, customers
can choose among FCoE direct attachment
to storage systems, native Fibre Channel
direct attachment to storage systems, FCoE
connection to FCoE-capable switches and
Figure 5. IT administrators use the same interface for configuring LAN and Fibre Channel SAN traffic.