Cisco has announced that it is to acquire its spin-in Insieme, and has provided new detail on the Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) for data centres that Insieme introduced earlier this year.
Insieme’s ACI solution consists of the 100 Gbps ready Nexus 9000 Series switches that run under an optimised version of NX-OS, and can support up to 1.92 Tbps of bandwidth capacity per slot. The eight-slot Nexus 9508 is available now, and other switches in the family will follow.
David Krozier, principal analyst for telecoms at the market analysis company Ovum, commented: 'Cisco continues to promote the role of hardware in delivering future high performance networks and took great pains to distance itself from pure software based overlay virtualised networks (like the Nicira technology VMware acquired, Junipers Contrail, and Alcatel-Lucent’s Nuage) in the data centre.
'Ovum notes that while the 9000 Series switches can operate standalone, the features provided by the APIC controller require Cisco hardware. While this may raise the hackles of those who believe future networks should be based on generic hardware platforms, this approach is unlikely to match the performance capabilities of ACI.'
