Cisco Continues to Drive Data Center Innovation

New High Performance Nexus 9000 Switches for Application Centric Infrastructure; New Nexus 3000 Switch for Cloud Providers

LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwired - Mar 24, 2014) - Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today continued its rapid pace of Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) innovation by introducing the new Cisco Nexus 9504 and Nexus 9516 switches to the Nexus 9000 portfolio®. The centralized policy-driven automation of the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), application profiles and Nexus 9000 switches combine to help organizations build highly secure cloud networks and hybrid clouds. Cisco also announced an addition to the Nexus 3000 family: the new Nexus 3164Q switch designed for the demanding workloads of massively scalable data centers (MSDC) and big data. Building on the programmability offerings of the Cisco 9000 portfolio, the Nexus 3164Q supports widest range of automation tools for Cloud providers including Linux Container support, XML, JSON, Puppet/Chef, Python, and OpenStack. Cisco Nexus 3000 switches power eight of the 10 leading cloud providers' networks covering the majority of their footprint. The announcements come as Cisco celebrates the fifth anniversary of its highly successful Unified Computing System (UCS)™.

According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index, nearly two-thirds of all workloads will be processed in the cloud by 2017, and over two-thirds of all data center traffic will come from the cloud. Companies building enterprise private clouds, public clouds and hybrid clouds need policy-based automation to optimize their cloud deployments and gain the most efficiency. ACI is the first data center and cloud solution to offer full network automation, visibility, security at scale, and integrated management of both physical and virtual networked IT resources, all built around the needs of applications.

du, a leading integrated telecommunications service provider in the United Arab Emirates and the fastest growing operator in the Middle East, is consolidating several data facilities into two next generation data centers designed to host new cloud services. "We selected Cisco's Nexus 9000 series switches and Application Centric Infrastructure as the foundation for our new data centers because the solution will streamline our operational processes and reduce operating expenses for power, cooling and cabling," said Saleem Al Balooshi, Executive Vice President - Network Development & Operations, du. "We particularly like the Cisco bi-directional optics which gives us four times the 40GE density as well as upgrades to 100Gb using the same cabling infrastructure, thereby removing the necessity for costly fibre upgrades."