6001 & 6004 - NPV

[Rajagopal Sivaramakrishnan]

We are planning to buy new top of the rack spine switches. We are now running with 5596 , and were hoping to buy 6001 or 6004.

Our existing 5596 connects to a brocade switch as an NP uplink. We arent running FCOE , but our server's CNA ports are connected to 5596 on a "fabric" port which then goes thro upstream NPV uplink for FLOGI.

I was reading through the datasheets of 6001 & 6004 and both seem to support NPV for FCOE, but not for general fabric traffic ? Is that true ? When do you think that this feature will be available on 6000 platforms ?

Raj

[Amit Singh]

Hi Rajagopal,

The current generation 6001 does not support native FC. 6004 will have some UP (unified ports FC/FCOE/10G/1G) port modules soon. Please expect this towards the second half of this year.

Please read this :

http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/datacenter/cisco-updating-nexus-for-sdn-and-ucs-with-whiptail-flash.html

Stay tuned next week for more announcement :-)

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

-amit singh

[Rajagopal Sivaramakrishnan]

Amit

Thanks so much, as always..

So, the 6000 series is not a direct replacement for the N5Ks ? Is 5672/56128 more a direct replacement for 5596 ?

Why was 6000 positioned then ? more for fcoe implementations ?

Raj

[Amit Singh · Accepted solution]

Hi Raj,

No 6000 is not a direct replacement of 5K. 6K was more taregted towards 40G and FCOE deployment with integrated Line-rate L3.

5672/56128 is an addition to 5500 10G family with 40G native flows, Fc/FCOE, Integrated L3 and more 10G port density.

Now after the 5672/56128, N6K is more for a 40G backbone or aggregation requirement. I would do 6K at the aggregation layer with TOR 5500/5600 and 40G QSFP+ uplinks.

Hope this helps, as always :-)

-amit singh

[Rajagopal Sivaramakrishnan]

This surely helps, as always

Have a great week ahead.

Raj