Super Tuesday delivers DC switching portfolio innovations and acceleration of hybrid cloud

Today is Super Tuesday, with fourteen states and territories hosting primary elections. Lots of media and preparation goes into this day.

And we have a lot of news to share with you. We've been doubling down on the data center by accelerating innovation across ASICs, hardware and software. Add in a strategic acquisition to deliver a complete solution for our customers, and you indeed have a Super Tuesday for Cisco.

I have two announcements to share today -one focused on the foundation that enables the cloud -from next gen SDN-ready DC Switching infrastructure ; and the other focused on accelerating hybrid cloud deployments for customers that want to drive business value from applications -with our intent to acquire CliQr.

Cloud scale switching: next generation Nexus switching portfolio

Using Cisco innovations in ASICs, hardware and software, we are delivering to our customers a 2-year time to market advantage. This advantage leverages cloud scale ASICs using 16nm technology versus our competition that still is based on 28nm.

Why this is important: we deliver bottom line value to our customers with 50% the cost, 50% power cooling savings, 50% faster application completion time.

Our new cloud scale technology gives Cisco a two-year time to market advantage over our competition, and lays a network foundation in the DC's based on the economics of cloud scale, delivering cloud services at wire rate.

We continue to offer choice for customers and drive innovation across Cisco's DC SDN solutions with 10/25/40/50/100G programmable networks, programmable fabrics, and ACI, as well as our hardware portfolio using both Cisco's own next generation silicon and merchant products.

In fact, Cisco is the leading seller of merchant silicon in the industry, with over 10 million ports shipped to date on the Nexus 3000 portfolio. We are already shipping the Nexus 9200 based on Cisco's Cloud Scale ASICs and will continue to ship the entire Nexus 9000 portfolio with Cisco's Cloud Scale ASIC's. For merchant switching product line, Cisco is already shipping with the latest Broadcom chips in our new Nexus 3100.

All about cloud services, cloud scale, and cloud economics

Our next generation Nexus switching portfolio is built with cloud scale technology. These include the new Cisco Nexus 9200 series and next-gen Nexus 9300EX switches, with the industry's first native 25Gbps-capable, SDN-ready (VxLAN/ACI) switches. We are delivering cloud scale, with an order of magnitude increase in the number of endpoints; cloud services with wire rate security and wire rate telemetry; and cloud economics, with 25G at the price of 10G and 100G at the price of 40G.

We are delivering at cloud scale:

• 7x increase in the density of endpoints
• Increased I/O traffic that drives 2.5x bandwidth.
• 25% more non-blocking route performance, including a 36p 100G line rate with a single chip
• Increased route table in the leaf and spine deliver 6x scale IPv4, 12x scale IPv6, and 1.8x scale MAC versus merchant silicon competitive switches.

We are driving simplification and automation through cloud services:

• Wire rate 100Gbps NetFlow, which offers data center wide granular visibility in real-time to enable better business insights, pervasive security and capacity planning.
• Security with network segmentation at cloud scale -from 140K microsegments per rack to an increased number of routes and number of hosts.

• Dynamic load balancing, which provides unique adaptive traffic congestion control to improve application completion time by over 50 percent.
• The portfolio supports both converged and hyperconverged infrastructure with IP storage support and intelligent buffers across the data center fabric that delivers dedicated buffers to ensure lossless traffic for IP and Fibre Channel traffic.

And we deliver all of this with cloud economics:

• 25G at the price of 10G, and 100G and the price of 40G, with investment protection for the next decade
• Multi-speed ports from 100M to 100G allow customers to speed up when ready
• ACI support for Nexus 7K/ASR 9K, addressing over 60% of N7K use cases
• IP storage using 50% less power, FCoE/FC ready
• 50% lower system cost, better reliability and lower power than our competition

"Given intensifying demands on the network, there is a strong market and customer mandate for ongoing network-silicon innovation. What we're seeing is demand-driven network-silicon innovation, a case of market pull rather than technology push." ~ Brad Casemore, Director of Research for Data Center Networking, IDC

"Our joint customers are excited to see Cisco and NetApp adding performance, agility, and economic benefits to FlexPod converged infrastructure.  Faster switching technology and better software-defined management capabilities are ideally suited to the newest all-flash FlexPod solutions designed for today's enterprise cloud-integrated customer," said Joel Reich, executive vice president, Product Operations, NetApp.

Making hybrid cloud all about the app

The acquisition of CliQr extends our vision of application relevancy. With CliQr, our mutual customers can very easily create application profiles, or blue prints that, once created, can be used to automatically provision all infrastructure -compute, storage, network, security etc.

Then just automatically deploy the application and its full set of components e.g. middleware, database etc. -across any data center and any of the 18 supported private and public clouds.

Cisco continues to see a rapid expansion in the way our customers create and version both new and existing applications, such as IOT, Customer-facing, mobile etc.

At the same time, our customers see a huge diversification in infrastructure environments, having to navigate through a mixture of traditional data centers to hybrid IT environments including data centers, private cloud, managed private and public clouds.

This expansion and diversification of applications and infrastructure highlights that traditional means of physically mapping applications to compute, storage, network etc. infrastructure and change this mapping every time the app of the infrastructure changes -just doesn't scale anymore.

Our customers are looking for simplification and automation of their Data Centers. The application teams want a way to drive delivery of services app down.

"The Cloud has led to a world where the application is able to define the infrastructure and platform it runs on," says Paul McMahon, Founder of ThinkAbovecloud.com, Global Cloud Strategist of Vodafone and former Chief Cloud Architect at BP. "Delivering on an application centric orchestration strategy, with products like CliQr lets the application drive relevancy into infrastructure and platform at the time of deployment. This becomes the core essential ingredient required to accelerate the transformation to hybrid IT environments including the Cloud."

To this end, we at Cisco have focused on application relevancy. Cisco SDN and ACI portfolio -which has recently been discussed as hitting a$2B/yr. run-rate -enables customers the policy model that utilizes application profiles to automatically configure networks based on the needs and nuances of the app.

Now with CliQr, our customers can easily create a single, simple to complex application profile that can drive application relevancy throughout any combination of datacenter, private or public clouds.

Our journey continues

There are many more innovations Cisco's engineers have been working hard to deliver in the areas of simplification and automation.

• The new Nexus Fabric Manager delivers a network-centric operational model and fabric automation for both the overlay and underlay -all with a few clicks.
• NX-OS, Cisco's data center operating system, now provides innovations such as segment routing, in service software upgrade, and microburst detection, allowing customers unparalleled traffic control, operational flexibility and fine grained visibility and security
• An upgrade to Cisco Nexus 9500 switches now offers high density 100Gbps infrastructure with the existing chassis: the industry's first non-blocking wire rate router with 36 ports of 100Gbps in a single rack unit and with 25 percent higher non-blocking bandwidth and port density compared to competitors
• Common hardware portfolio support available through consistent RESTFUL APIs, and comprehensive self-service DevOps automation, supporting programmable networks, programmable fabric and ACI.

Our Super Tuesday may come and go, but we continue on our journey to deliver software defined everything for our customers - from compute with UCS, to storage with new HyperFlex, to the network, with Cisco SDN solutions including ACI, and now extended to the cloud with CliQr.

You can read more about our announcement in our press release.