For many more years than I care to remember the Cisco Catalyst line of switches have defined Cisco's high end best in class switch line. I remember evaluating potential web hosting companies in my days at Interliant and when talking about their data center and connectivity, they defined it by how many 6500's they had.  Over the years the variety of IOS versions was maddening to try and make things work across the board.  Well after three years in development and a mere 250 million in dev costs (according to this article), the blood, sweat and tears of 500 engineers, Cisco gives us Nexus! It sounds like the name of some demonic computer that I remember from an old sci-fi movie. 

In fact Nexus is more than just one big honking switch. It runs a whole new Cisco OS, the NX-OS. Joy, another Cisco OS to work out compatibility with. It combines Ethernet with Fibre Channel. Nexus is already 10Gbps today but has the chops to go to 40 and even 100 Gbps according to the Cisco folks.  All of this for a mere 75k or so.  As the folks at Cisco say, you need to have a budget to buy this baby. But you can't be on a budget to afford it either. However, it is Cisco and I am willing to bet that this will become the de facto standard in data center switches in the years to come.

What about security you ask? Well it seems that Nexus supports TrustSec. It also supports NAC, though I guess that means Cisco Network Admission Control, and not NAC in the generic sense.  I am sure there will be plans to put cards in for IPS and other security technologies. Whether they will scale to match the throughput of this monster is another thing.