Cisco Insider Series for Networking
Futurum’s Daniel Newman and Ron Westfall jumped on the Cisco Insider Series for Networking podcast to join the “Analyst Insights: What’s Driving 400G Forward?” session. With Cisco’s Jasmine Shah as the moderator and Cisco’s Gerald Richard providing expert insights, we enjoyed the opportunity to delve in the hot topic of 400G technology and why it’s a game changer across the data center networking landscape.
In this conversation, we explore the dramatic upswing in capacity demand across data center environments due to factors such as the global pandemic driving organizations to substantially accelerate the adoption of work-from-home (WFH) and work-from-anywhere (WFA) policies. With many planning to retain workforce WFH/WFA distribution models throughout 2021 and beyond even as the pandemic recedes, this is an important network-related conversation for organizations to be having. Factor in greater demand for distance learning, immersive entertainment, cloud gaming, and overall Internet usage and the surge in bandwidth demand we are seeing is truly global and society-wide in nature.
As a result, it’s no surprise that data center networking, capacity, and management is top of mind for IT leaders. The demand for increased Ethernet speeds, virtual data center builds, rapid IoT development, greater edge compute resources, and hybrid/multi-cloud expansion, along with the need for better data center networking resources has never been greater. There is no doubt that data center networking decision makers must take a comprehensive approach in understanding the strategic portfolio resources essential to enabling their 400G implementations.
We discussed and analyzed the swiftly growing capacity demands and why 400G is a promising technology key to fulfilling essential new data center (DC) environment demands at a comparatively low operational expense. In this part of the podcast, we covered:
- The current state of 400G and what new drivers are accelerating the need for 400G DCs.
- Why up to 94% of workloads and compute instances will be processed in cloud DCs in 2021.
- How WFH and digital workforce transitions will have long-lasting impact on DC demands.
- Why DCI connectivity, uncompressed video, and HPC clusters warrant the 400G use case.
- How innovations, such as QSFP-DD, RoCE, and DCI with ZR/ZR+, deliver 400G breakthroughs.
- Why CSPs, hyperscalers, large enterprises, and professional media networks are leading adopters.
We addressed the top priorities we’re seeing for customers in considering and adopting 400G technology. From our perspective, capacity, performance, and features are the most important selection criteria for evaluating 400G data center switching products. Moreover, and of top priority, suppliers must offer a comprehensive data center networking portfolio to fulfill the strategic business outcome demands of customers. As a result, providing overall portfolio capabilities such as intent-based networking (IBN), application-centric infrastructure (ACI), cloud expertise, and supply chain reliability are vital to winning the emerging 400G competition.
We wrapped up our conversation assessing why the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series excels at meeting these top priority 400G customer requirements. Key considerations such as Cisco’s development of the Cloud Scale ASIC specifically for the Nexus 9000 series assures feature parity across the data and control planes as well as unparalleled port densities and bandwidth performance. Moreover, the Nexus 9000 Series supports the built-in data telemetry for analytics, encryption with MACSec, and the automation features essential to enabling the intelligent fabric required to transform data center networking in the 400G era.
The key takeaway is that the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series 400G data center networking solution fulfills all the top customer priorities, buying selection criteria, product differentiators, and comprehensive portfolio assets required to give data center and IT decision makers the full confidence needed to accelerate investment in 400G technology.
You can tune in on your favorite streaming platforms – Spotify, Apple Podcasts or SoundCloud.
Futurum Research provides industry research and analysis. These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice.
Other insights from Futurum Research:
Cisco Nexus 400G: Delivering Ecosystem-wide Data Center Networking Innovation
Cisco Comes In Just Above Expectations for its Fiscal Q2
Also be sure to check out our Video on Demand Roundtable Discussion in the Cisco Data Center Network Insider Series – Futurum Insights: What’s Driving 400G Forward?
Image Credit: Data Center Planet
Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
