It's an exciting time in to be in our industry, especially as we witness how technology continues to reshape how we connect and communicate through a myriad of applications and devices not only within our own companies, but also with our customers and partners.

At the epicenter of this technological transformation, we continue to find that the network is what ultimately enables these applications and their users to connect. We also quickly find that if this same network is not ready to deal with the ever increasing influx of devices, new applications with varying traffic patterns, and 24  x 7 access from pretty much anywhere, it can quickly turn into an IT departments nightmare.

It is exactly to deal with these new types of requirements that the award-winning Nexus 9000 Series (made up of both the Nexus 9500 and Nexus 9300 portfolios) was introduced into the market almost 11 months ago. Now, over 600 customers have purchased this new switching family and are experiencing the positive impact that having a high performing, scalable, programmable, and resilient data center network has on application performance and overall user quality of experience in both traditional and Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) architectures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGmM2vzF0oA

Today we are happy to announce the addition of three new switches into the Nexus 9300 Series as well as a 6-port 40Gbps module to deliver more flexibility and form factor options to meet different architectural needs.  The new products are:

• Cisco Nexus 9372TX: 1-rack-unit switch supporting 1.44 Tbps of bandwidth across 48 fixed 1/10-Gbps BASE-T ports and 6 fixed 40-Gbps QSFP+ ports
• Cisco Nexus 9372PX: 1-rack-unit switch supporting 1.44 Tbps of bandwidth across 48 fixed 1/10-Gbps SFP+ ports and 6 fixed 40-Gbps QSFP+ ports
• Cisco Nexus 9332PQ: 1-rack-unit switch supporting 2.56 Tbps of bandwidth across 32 x 40Gbps QSFP+ ports
• 6-port 40 Gigabit Ethernet Modulefor the Nexus 93128TX, 9396TX , and 9396PX for connectivity options to meet your needs

These new switches deliver high performance, additional buffers, as well as support for VXLAN routing in a compact form factor. In addition to this, support for the Cisco Nexus 2000 Fabric Extenders has also been added to the Nexus 9300 portfolio. So if you already had Fabric Extenders in your data center or are looking for a scalable and operationally simplified architecture -you can now have the best of both worlds.

But it doesn't end there -in case you missed it, Cisco recently announced the availability of the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) making the creation of a more simplified, robust, application-centric infrastructure  a reality with the Nexus 9000 Series as the network foundation. You can read more about it here -in Craig Huitema's blog, which outlines not only new products on the nexus 9000 series including 100Gbps on the Nexus 9500, but also how we have simplified the introduction of the Nexus 9000 and ACI into data centers through different ACI starter kits and bundles. In addition, for those of you that want to deploy the Nexus 7000 in combination with the Nexus 9300s, new bundles that bring together the Nexus 7000 and Nexus 9300 are also available.

As you can see, we continue to deliver the products and architectural options that will allow data centers of all sizes to address increasing and changing application requirements.  Between the Nexus 9300 and Nexus 9500 portfolios and their ability to be deployed into 3-tier, spine/leaf, or ACI architectures, customers can benefit from more connectivity options and a diverse set of form factors to meet varying data center needs. I invite you to learn more about the Nexus 9000 Series at www.cisco.com/go/nexus9000.