For those of you who are not Star Trek fans, the title is actually paraphrased from a classic Star Trek movie: the “Nexus” was the name of a timeless paradise where every wish was fulfilled. (If you can guess the name of the movie, I’ll be more than happy to give you my telephone number – only hunky, tall and handsome Trekkies qualify!)

So it’s really pretty cool – and appropriate - that Cisco has decided to call its latest family of network switches the “Nexus”. Is it just a coincidence, or is there a hidden Trekkie somewhere inside the Cisco product development team?

Beam my network performance up. My boss is getting all excited about SOA as the next big thing, so it’s inevitable that when the time comes to delivery, he’s going to look at the network manager – that’s me! In a services-oriented environment, the network is going to play a pivotal role in orchestrating virtual IT resources and scaling workloads. The Cisco Nexus family of switches was designed with this environment in mind, with the ability to deliver wire-speed, cut-through forwarding with full throughput and no oversubscription, giving it the capacity to alleviate the bandwidth demands created by racks full of high-density, multi-core servers.

Scale factor 9, Sulu. The Nexus 5000 and Nexus 7000 are both highly scalable modular platforms that deliver up to 15 terabits per second of switching capacity in a single chassis, supporting up to 512 10-gigabits-per-second (Gbps) Ethernet and future delivery of 40- and 100-Gbps Ethernet. How’s that for scalability?

Make it so. Ah, the wonders of Data Center Center Network Manager (DCNM). This is the wonderful new centralized management function that supports the new Nexus family of switches, and provides complete visibility across data center networks. Built on the foundation of Cisco Fabric Manager for storage networks, DCNM provides topology discovery and visualization for increased operational efficiency and systems awareness.

So there you have it: 3 reasons why the Nexus is the network manager’s equivalent of paradise. And as Bones might say (if he had been in my job): "It's a network, Jim, but not as we know it!"