Show 106 – Cisco Nexus Buyer’s Guide – Deep-Dive Series Kickoff

9 June 2012 by 4 Comments

In this show, Ethan Banks is joined by Tony Mattke, Chris Marget, and Jeff Fry to kick off a deep-dive series about the Cisco Nexus product line. Nexus gear is making frequent appearances in Cisco shops these days, as enterprises and service providers refresh their aging Catalyst hardware. The Nexus line keeps growing and changing both in hardware and capability, so we’re taking a look at what’s going on under the covers, telling the story from our own personal Nexus experience.

This first installment is a buyer’s guide. We run through all the major Nexus products, and talk through speeds and feeds, power considerations, line card capabilities, costs, market positioning, product licensing, and even touch on the management software.

Links

Cisco’s Nexus Jump Page

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:26:05 — 39.6MB)

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About Ethan Banks

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, is a hands-on networking practitioner who has designed, built and maintained networks for higher education, state government, financial institutions, and technology corporations. Ethan is a host of the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over one million unique downloads, and today reaches a global audience of over ten thousand listeners. Also a writer, Ethan covers network engineering and the networking industry for a variety of IT publications. He is also the editor for the independent community of bloggers at PacketPushers.net. Follow @ecbanks.

  • http://twitter.com/nkrypted Brandon Mangold

    Ethan it was nice to meet you in person today. Wonderful episode! I very much look forward to the rest of this series, specifically if you can find some folks who have FabricPath production experience.

    • http://twitter.com/hill_yard David Hillyard

      I second the FabricPath discussion. I’m configuring a small FabricPath topology for a POC and I am curious what others are doing — specifically for the Layer3 traffic. I am leaning towards HSRP using vPC+ to load balance the default gateway traffic.

  • riw777

    Thanks for this –it’s always hard for me to keep up with hardware; shows like this make my life a lot easier in this area.

  • http://thenetworksherpa.com/ john harrington

    Hi guys, I loved the podcast and kudos to the panelists who really knew their stuff. One comment I would have is that the Nexus 3000 isn’t quite the niche product that is seems. It’s true that Cisco needed a low latency commodity switch to fill a market-gap for the financial trading sector. But the Broadcom Trident+ chipset in the nexus 3000 delivers significant performance.

    The N3K series routers do have limited route capacity and buffering, but an N3K could fill the role of layer-3 core datacenter router in many medium sized data centers. If you bought an nx7010 filled it with M108 line-cards it would cost you a few bucks. It takes 21RU of rackspace and a shed-load of power, but can drive 64 x routed 10Gbps ports at line rate. This seems pretty impressive until you realise that an nx3064 can provide the same performance figures at a ‘much’ lower price and in a 1RU package.

    Cisco will position this as a top-of-rack, financial-trading-only device, but it has greater potential. I would encourage Nexus buyers to at least give the N3K data sheet a quick glance before laying down hard cash for Nexus big-iron.

    Thanks again for this awesome podcast episode.