Cisco announces new Nexus Switches and ASA

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20th October 2011

Cisco announces new Nexus Switches

Cisco today announced their latest iteration of the Nexus coverged storage and data switches.

Network World have a good article covering the announcements

In summary:

  • New switching fabric called imaginatively, “fabric-2” which scales to 550GB per slot – more than twice the thoughput on the original fabric.
  • New Nexus 3016 which provides 16 ports of 40GB Ethernet.
  • New Nexus 4048 – provides 48 10/100/1000 Mbps ports plus 10GB uplinks
  • Fabricpath support for the Nexus 5500 series providing multiple active layer 2 paths across a “top of rack” topology
  • ASA 1000V firewall – Cisco’s first purely software based firewall – using the same underlying technology as the 1000V switch

Price points are said to be “competitive” – which for Nexus probably means “expensive”.

Barry Hesk

Cisco and HP working together again..?

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17th October 2011

Cisco and HP working together again..?

Following their well documented falling out a couple of years ago when Cisco moved aggressively into the Data Centre server market to compete directly against HP, the two companies haven’t exactly been on speaking terms. Indeed, HP’s acquisition of 3COM was almost definitely a reaction to this spat and Cisco no longer re-badge any of HP’s technology in the MCS 7800 server range, with all of these units coming from IBM.

However, maybe things are changing. Cisco and HP have collaborated on the Cisco Nexus B22 Fabric Extender for HP. This unit offers tight integration between HP BladeSystem and Cisco Nexus 5000/7000 switches.

More details on the solution are available here.

Maybe a solution for world peace may be possible after all then….

Barry

Cisco October 2011 Product Quick Reference Guide

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October 14th 2011

Cisco October 2011 Product Quick Reference Guide

I recently retweeted a link from Cisco that provided access (supposedly) to an online version of the new October 2011 Product Guide.

Obviously Cisco likes to keep things a secret as the process for actually getting hold of the thing was convoluted at best. Maybe we’re all under a need to know basis, and we don’t need to know.

Anyway, I’ve managed to download the thing and have put it into the Downloads section of the Intrinsic web site. This is password protected (following Cisco’s security model) so if you need to grab a hold of it, let us know (email info@intrinsic-comms.co.uk) and we’ll define you an account.

Barry Hesk

Twitter updates from Intrinsic Connect

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12 October 2011

Twitter updates from Intrinsic Connect

We’ve recently integrated posting direct from Twitter into Intrinsic Connect. This way we can share with you any interesting information that we subscribe to from other industry feeds. The format of these postings is slightly different to ones that we create. The subject will look like:

RT @*Source* *Subject* *Content*

This is simply due to Twitter’s 140 character message limitation. There will also generally be a “t.co” hyperlink to the actual page in question. Postings from Intrinsic Connect also synchronise the other way, and end up on our Twitter Feed

Any questions, please contact us.

Barry

Barry Hesk