Cisco Updates Data Center Software, Hardware Lineups

Cisco Systems has been making a large deal about converged data center hardware infrastructures for more than two years with its Unified Computing System, as increased functionality gets wedged into smaller components and servers and routers—and as Cisco got into the server business.

Now the world’s biggest IT networking company and newbie data center systems maker is using the convergence headline to explain its 2011 data center software strategy, which becomes physical in the company’s Data Center Business Advantage portfolio.

Cisco on March 30 launched a flotilla of new hardware products, including an application/networking server, several storage switches, something called a "fabric extender," management tools and a data center management appliance—data center items that refresh a good deal of Cisco’s product lineup.

That’s not all. Cisco also updated its data center operating system, Cisco NX-OS, to run all these new machines.

In fact, the list of new items is so long and detailed that it would be fallacious to try to describe them all here. Thus, we’ll do something we don’t often do here at eWEEK: refer you to the Cisco product announcement for all the details.

The most important new items are the new server, switches and the operating system.

The new Unified Computing System C260 M2 Rack-Mount Server crams even more computing, networking, storage access and virtualization resources into a single box for the rack, Data Center Product Marketing Manager Omar Sultan told eWEEK. This is the box that will run the Cisco OS and contain all the network and storage management tools, among other things.

For more, read the eWEEK article: Cisco Refreshes Data Center Hardware, Software Lineup.