Cisco Nexus 9000 switch starts at $79K for 288 ports

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Cisco Nexus 9000 switch starts at $79K for 288 ports

"The APIC is decoupled from the data and control planes, though some questions remain whether or not the ACI platform is truly open."

New York City: Mon, 7/21/14 - 8:08pm View comments

Update 7/29/14 - 2:19pm:

"Software licensing, hardware costs, and bundles for starters and Catalyst 6500 upgrades."

Last month the Cisco ACI platform enjoyed passionate debate.

And it now appears Wall Street is questioning if the Cisco ACI platform is truly open too.

I mean in his research note today, RBC Capital Markets Managing Director, Mark Sue, made the following 6-points:

"Cisco ACI, the APIC controller, and the Nexus 9000 are Cisco's solution for the 10G/40G/100G datacenter and enterprise switching market."

"While criticized for being slow to introduce products for the cloud datacenter market, Cisco has been responding over the past year. With the introduction of the Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) in November 2013 and the APIC policy controller shipping this summer, Cisco now has the product portfolio in place to start reclaiming switch share and to defend its market share for the upgrade/replacement cycle of the Catalyst 6500."

"The Nexus 9500 has the capability to run in two different modes. There is a standalone mode that runs the NX-OS and there is ACI mode. While Cisco has been shipping the Nexus 9000 lines in standalone mode, it is really the ACI mode that represents the next generation offering that will compete for 10G/40G market share."

"Cisco ACI was originally shipped with the Nexus 9000 only, but has now branched out to integrate with Ciscos UCS and is available for earlier generation Nexus switches such as the Nexus 7000, 6000, 5000, 4000 and 2000, helping to protect those investments. There will be incentive for customers to migrate to the Nexus 9000 though, as it is the only product currently that will have the entire ACI feature capabilities. As of F3Q14, Cisco reiterated ACI had 175 live customers and a pipeline of 1k and we expect investors will be watching this number closely in the upcoming F4Q14 to monitor progress."

"In the Nexus family, Cisco introduced the Nexus 9500/9300. The Nexus 9508 acts as the spine, while the Nexus 9396 serves the leaf in its leaf-spine architecture. The Nexus 9000 switch starts at $79k for 288 ports, and can scale up to have a 'pay-as-you-grow' model. The Nexus 9000 switches operate both in stand-alone and in ACI mode with a software upgrade."