Cisco Systems plans on Monday to introduce a network switch for corporations grappling with rapidly growing Internet data transfers and the increased use of applications that draw on remote data storage, known as cloud computing.
The switch, called the Nexus 7000, will provide a sharp increase in traffic capacity over the company’s current products, to 15 trillion bits of data a second.
Cisco has made a significant bet on the rapidly expanding data demands of the consumer Internet. Its Nexus system, which will eventually replace a product line that represents about a third of its $35 billion business, has required roughly $1 billion in research and development costs and the efforts of more than 500 engineers in the last four years, the company said.
Cisco sees the market for the product as corporate computing operations and Internet service providers now struggling to keep up with the torrent of data being produced by a broad range of new online services including movie downloads and Internet video games.
Industry analysts said the system is likely to have a notable impact on the way companies design data centers, and represents the possible dominance of a new version of the Ethernet networking standard that Cisco is designing to handle torrents of digital data.
It's interesting to see Cisco playing up the backplane capacity angle. In practice this is not (only) what providers are really "grappling" with.
