In January Cisco Systems announced Nexus 7000, a major “rethink” of the corporate network switch. To be honest, it’s better not to think of the Nexus 7000 as a switch; a switch can be something you turn a light on with. Instead, think of it as a cage full of network blades that just happens to be the corporate network in a box. And by the way, it’s a bewilderingly fast network too. If you have a wide enough pipe into “the cloud”, it could download and distribute the whole Wikipedia in a hundredth of a second, or 100,000 movies in just over 6 minutes or the whole of the searchable Internet in 7.5 minutes.

Technically (skip this paragraph if you don’t speak Geek), the switch is designed for 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks, but allows for the future availability of 40Gb and 100Gb Ethernet and unified fabric I/O modules, and it scales beyond traffic rates of 15 terabits per second. And, get this; it’s powered by an OS (or perhaps we should call it a NOS) the Cisco NX-OS, which is there primarily to ensure continuous system availability and network flexibility.

In summary: The network is a computer.

And if you think that’s just a smart-ass bit of word play: it’s not.

A World Turned Upside Down

Cisco’s vision, which can become reality with the Nexus, is of a data center that is no longer defined by computer architecture, but by network architecture. This makes sense on many levels. Let’s list them in the hope of making it easier to understand.

1. Networks have become so fast that in many instances it is practical to send the the data to the program, or to send the program to the data, or to send both the program and the data somewhere else to execute. Software architecture has been about keeping data and process together to satisfy performance constraints. Well Moore’s Law reduced the performance issue and Metcalfe’s Law opened up the network. All the constraints of software architecture reduced and they continue to reduce. Distributing both software and data becomes easier by the year.
2. Software is increasingly being delivered as a service that you connect to. And if it cannot deliver the right performance characteristics in the place where it lives, you move it to a place where it can.
3. Increasingly there is more and more intelligence being placed on the switch or on the wire. Of course Cisco has been adding intelligence to the switch for years. Those Cisco firewalls and VPNs were exactly that. But also, in the last 5 years, agentless sotware (for example some Intrusion Detection products) has become prominent. Such applications simply listen to the network and initiate action if they “don’t like what they hear”. The point is that applications don’t have to live in server blade cabinets. You can put them on switches or you could put them onto server boards that sit in a big switch cabinet. They’re very portable.
4. The network needs an OS (or NOS). Whether Cisco has the right OS is a point for debate, but the network definitely needs an OS and the OS needs to perform the functions that Cisco’s NX-OS carries out. It also needs to do other things to like optimize and load balance all the resources in a way that corresponds to the service level needs of the important business transactions and processes it supports. Personally, I do not see how that OS can do anything but span the whole network – including the switches.

From this perspective, the most important feature of the Nexus 7000 is its “fabric” which is designed to orchestrate data center resources (not just the network). That means; servers, storage resources and applications. And when I use the term data center here, I’m not talking about a single building or single site, because the Nexus can thread multiple sites that are thousands of miles apart together and, in theory at least, run them as a unit. It’s not prohibitively expensive either. The Nexus and its software start at $75,000 and Cisco puts the cost to a typical company at about $200,000.

Cisco is either very lucky or it has excellent timing, because the Nexus has been launched at precisely the time that virtualization has become the “trend du jour” and the virtual resource spaces that virtualization creates are in serious need of global management. With the Nexus, companies should be able to configure given combinations of bandwidth, processing, storage and software.

As far as I know, no-one else can do this – because they cannot allocate/virtualize bandwidth. (and if you think that bandwidth allocation is not a factor in performance, you are wrong).

The Big Switch

Of course Cisco is not the only network player in the game. Juniper Networks and Brocade will undoubtedly be introducing products that are competitive to the Nexus soon. But the big question is:

How does this affect IBM, HP, Dell and Sun?

In the grand scheme of things, if these vendors cannot produce switch technology, then in the long run they are reduced to the role of component providers to the data center. Because even a big bad blue tyrannosaurus mainframe is just a component as far as the Nexus is concerned – and a huge SAN is “just another storage resource”.

And that’s the whole point. Cisco’s switch is game changing and it will surely provoke a new technology war between some of the giants of the industry. For a while, of course, it will be a phony war, until the early adopters of the “big switch” have implemented it and it becomes clear what difference it actually makes.

At the beginning of January I published some forecasts including one for the communications sector: Forecasts for 2008: #5 Communications Convergence. As far as Cisco is concerned, I’m already wrong. I was suggesting that the main communications vendors would need to “go soft”. I’m now of the opinion that Cisco does not need to go soft in the way I suggested. It has already gone soft by developing a NOS and a fabric, and that is enough of a strategic differentiator to allow to continue to pump iron for years.

This is a posting in the Virtualization Focus Series. Click here to see an index of such postings.