Cisco Unveils Next Generation Data Centre Architecture Solutions

Cisco Systems, the networking equipment giant, has announced plans to dish out a bunch of new and improved data center products that will aim to interconnect and manage resources among multiple data centers and are also designed for cloud computing and virtualisation.

According to the San Jose, California based IT giant, the new product line is designed to cater to the company's Nexus 7000 and Catalyst 6500 and 4900M Ethernet switches as well as its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) acceleration and Application Control Engine (ACE) load balancing appliances.

The enhancements for the Nexus 7000's NX-OS operating system will include Overlay Transport Virtualization feature which is designed to allow IT administrators to shift workloads and virtual machines across data centers without having to redesign or reconfigure their networks.

Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with the Yankee Group, commenting on the enhanced data centers said in a statement that “In theory, OTV should be a little simpler because I believe all you're doing is an overlay that keeps the architecture of the original network the same. This is a solution for the masses.”

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The new technology will also allow multi-pathing, multi-homing and loop prevention and is designed to suppress flooding of unknown layer 2 traffic and spanning tree packets.