Cisco

Cisco To Acquire Remaining Interest In Nuova Systems

April 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

And why were Dante Malagrino of Cisco and Ed Bugnion of Nuova Systems jointly featured in the video presentation of Cisco Nexus 5000 we shared earlier today?

Start-up Nuova Systems operated as a majority-owned subsidiary of Cisco, which had invested $70 million and owned 80 % of the company. Cisco announced its initial investment in Nuova in August 2006 and announced an amendment to the agreement in April 2007 that expanded the development scope, increased the funding commitment and raised the maximum potential payout of the transaction to $678 million. And now Cisco has formally expressed its intent to acquire remaining interest in the company.

From the press release:

“Cisco today announced its intent to purchase the remaining 20 % interest in San Jose-based Nuova Systems, a start up focused on the development of next-generation products for the data center market. Cisco today also introduced the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series, the first product developed by Nuova. The Cisco Nexus 5000 is a 10 Gigabit Ethernet “top-of-rack” switch that offers unified fabric capabilities through the support for multiple data center networking protocols and software intelligence.”

The Nuova transaction is success-based with the total value primarily determined by the revenue of Nuova products over three measurement periods. The first measurement period will commence in early fiscal year 2010, the second measurement period will commence in late fiscal year 2010, and the third measurement period will commence in mid fiscal year 2011. The acquisition is expected to close in Q4 of Cisco’s FY 2008. It will be acquisition No. 126 for Cisco overall and the fifth one in FY ’08.

Video: Cisco Nexus 5000 And Virtualization

April 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

DataCenterKnowledge posted a video presentation today we would love to share with you too. It features Dante Malagrino of Cisco and Ed Bugnion of Nuova Systems with an explanation of how data center managers can use the new Cisco Nexus 5000 Series switches to optimize their virtualization efforts (Cisco recently introduced the 7000 Series). Prior to joining Cisco, Bugnion was a co-founder and chief architect of VMware.

EMC Updates SAN Virtualization Solution Invista 2.1

March 3, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

EMC has introduced the latest version of Invista 2.1 (demo), its flagship SAN virtualization solution. Invista is an enterprise-class, network-based storage virtualization that combines EMC application software and hardware with intelligent SAN switches from Brocade and Cisco.

The new version of Invista features higher availability for improved data protection, expanded scalability for stronger performance, and enhanced management for better utilization, all of which help organizations keep their infrastructures up and running through both planned and unplanned events. Invista has enhanced high availability through the new distributed control path cluster (CPC) which allows nodes of the CPC to be separated by campus distances, providing for Invista to continue operating in case of localized failure. The number of virtual volumes and storage elements supported has doubled, and there is a five-fold increase in the number of simultaneous mobility sessions supported. Invista’s new heterogeneous pooling and mirroring functionality provides maximum flexibility in creating tiered storage pools and supports mirrored copies across different tiers.

EMC Invista has now been tested, optimized and certified for use with VMware ESX Server 3.0.2, thus enabling organizations to improve their ability to manage, share, and protect the growing amount of information that is being supported by VMware Infrastructure environments. EMC Invista version 2.0 is now available; version 2.1, which includes heterogeneous mirroring and storage pooling, will be available later his month. Invista support for VMware ESX Server 3.0.2 is expected to be posted to the VMware SAN Compatibility Guide before the end of 2007.

[Source: IT-Director]

Cisco Introduces Nexus 7000 Series: Virtual Switches for Future Data Centers?

January 29, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Cisco Systems this week starts pitching a new series of switches, called Nexus 7000 , as the first component of its Data Center 3.0 architecture and as the successor to the Catalyst 6500, the most successful product in Cisco’s history. Like the Catalyst 6500, the Nexus is a chassis intended for the enterprise data center, into which customers stack blades for additional interfaces. But whereas the Catalyst 6500 is a jack-of-all-trades that can be a firewall, a load balancer, or a router depending on the blades plugged into it, the Nexus is aimed at just one job: virtualization.

The company claims it can:

* copy all the searchable Web in less than eight minutes;
* download Wikipedia’s database in 10 milliseconds;
* download 90,000 Netflix movies in less than 40 seconds;
* run 5 million concurrent high-quality videoconferences between New York and San Francisco;
* or send a two-megapixel digital photograph of CEO John Chambers to every human being on earth in 28 minutes.

InformationWeek puts it this way:

“Cisco’s vision is one in which big companies off-load an increasing number of server tasks to network switches, with servers ultimately becoming little more than virtual machines inside a switch. The Nexus doesn’t deliver that, but it makes a start, aiming to virtualize the network interface cards, host bus adapters, and cables that connect servers to networks and remote storage. At present, those require dedicated local area networks and storage area networks, with each using a separate network interface card and host bus adapter for every virtual server. The Nexus aims to consolidate them all into one (or two, for redundancy), with virtual servers connecting through virtual NICs.”

Meanwhile, All Things Digital’s John Paczkowski jokingly claims the switch is ‘fast enough to create rift in space-time continuum ‘.