Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches are built from the ground up with scalability and openness to meet the needs of our customers. While the open APIs are more than enough for the majority, some webscale customers running large scalable data centers prefer to choose specific hardware and software to meet their unique requirements.

Last year, we announced new portability options for data center networking software and hardware by disaggregating the Network Operating System (NX-OS) from our hardware (Nexus). In doing this, Cisco made available the Switch Abstraction Interfac (SAI), a standard-based ASIC API that allows Nexus 9000 switches with Cloud Scale technology to interact with third-party operating systems (OS).

SAI has been available for select customers on Nexus 9000 100G and 40G top of rack switches (Nexus 9232C, Nexus 92304 and Nexus 9364C ). Recently, Cisco announced a new Nexus 9336C 100G leaf switch that delivers crucial software and hardware features for modern cloud infrastructure, including support for SAI. Here is a quick summary of those announcements:

  • 36-port 100G leaf switch with features for modern cloud infrastructure, ideal for 25G/ 50G/100G server environments;
  • Smart buffers for AI/ML use cases requiring low latency RoCEv2 traffic; and
  • Industry-leading telemetry capabilities with built-in flow table and statistics export capabilities for continuous monitoring and insights.

Cisco continues to work closely with our webscale customers to deliver various operating and consumption models that enable increased agility and a lower total cost of ownership. For example, Cisco's Nexus 9000 switches running with theSONiC OS can address the rapidly changing scale requirements of global cloud providers.

This week at the TIP Summit in London (Oct. 16, 17) we are showcasing two solutions. The first demo will feature the Nexus 9000 enabled through SAI interacting with SONiC. And although the demo focuses on the SONiC OS, customers can practically run any OS designed to take advantage of the standard-based ASIC APIs.

The second demo will showcase Cisco's NX-OS, now available to run on White box platforms designed to be Open Compute Project (OCP) compliant. Today, customers can power Facebook Wedge TOR with NX-OS. For those who rely on the feature richness and operational experience of NX-OS, they can now use it with their preferred hardware spec or white box platform, which must be OCP compliant and support the Open Network Install Environment (ONIE). OCP defines and enables standardized interfaces and procedures to boot and run a third-party OS on a white box platform.

To view the demos, please visit the Cisco booth at : TIP Summit

We remain committed to the success of our customers. Through disaggregation of Cisco NX-OS, customers running webscale data centers now have greater choice and flexiblity in choosing hardware and software. Cisco continues to meet the needs of resource-constrained IT professionals with a dynamic data center infrastructure that is easy to manage, affordable and flexible.

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Cisco Systems Inc. published this content on 17 October 2018 and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 17 October 2018 13:12:11 UTC