Cisco introduced the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series of data center-class switches, with strengthens the company's existing portfolio and builds on its commitment to invest over the next 18 months in new products and capabilities to help customers architect the next-generation data center.

The Cisco Nexus 5000 Series represents the first common effort of Cisco and Nuova Systems and is designed for data center consolidation with investment protection, helping allow customers to transition to a unified fabric at their own pace. It also meets stringent customer requirements for operational continuity, transport flexibility and scalability. With a unified fabric, IT organizations can simplify cabling infrastructure, reduce the number of required adapters, lower costs, and reduce power consumption and their carbon footprint.

The Cisco Nexus 5000 Series delivers line-rate, low-latency, 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching, as well as the industry's first standards-based, input/output (I/O) consolidation solution via support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Data Center Ethernet and virtualization technologies.

The switch is an extension to the Cisco Nexus family designed to support increasing I/O demands of multicore processors and virtualized environments. With its support for FCoE, the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series consolidates local-area network (LAN), Fibre Channel and iSCSI-based storage-area networks (SANs) and server cluster traffic onto an Ethernet-based unified fabric.

According to the company, the Cisco Nexus 5000 platform can connect to either Cisco Nexus 7000 or Cisco Catalyst 6500 in the aggregation/core layers of the data center. With native Fibre Channel interfaces, the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series can also connect to SAN fabrics built with the Cisco MDS 9000 platform. This helps enable customers to deploy the Cisco Nexus 5000 and FCoE today for I/O consolidation in the access layer, while protecting their technology investments in aggregation and core layers.

The Cisco Nexus 5000 Series pricing starts at $36,000 for the fixed configuration 40-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch, and is scheduled to be available May 2008.