Cisco refreshes its data centre and cloud networking equipment lineup with a focus on 40-Gigabit ethernet, cloud-to-cloud management, opensource networking and software-defined networking (SDN). 

Part of the company's Unified Data Centre strategy, new products include additions to the Nexus 6000 switch series-- the Nexus 6004 (fits 96 40Gbps ethernet ports or 384 10GbE ports into a single 4U solution) and the Nexus 6001 (fits 48 10GbE and 4 40GbE in 1U), both with ethernet and fibre channel over enternet (FCoE) traffic support. 

The Nexus 7000 data centre core switch gets an addition with the Network Analysis Module (NAM) services blade, available in either hardware or virtualised (vNAM) versions. 

Further performance expansions come through the Nexus 2248PQ 10GbE ethernet fabric extender and the Nexus 5500 40GbE expansion module. 

For customers working between multiple clouds Cisco offers the Nexus 1000V InterCloud-- an application handling the moving of workloads and corresponding security policies between clouds, regardless of virtualisation hypervisor in use with a single point of management. 

Meanwhile the Virtual Network Management Centre (VNMC) InterCloud provides a single policy point for services across both enterprise and provider domains, with the ability to manage virtual machine lifecycle across multiple hypervisors in hybrid clouds and multiple clouds via APIs. 

And finally the Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) gets an expansion with ONE Software Controller. It includes the new One Platform Kit (onePK) and OpenFlow, providing APIs for the Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR) and Aggregation Services Router (ASR) platforms. 

Go Cisco Unleashes Open Networking "Fabric" for Data Centres, Clouds