The innovative architecture of the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches simplifies data center transformation by helping to enable a standards-based, high-performance unified fabric. Next-generation data centers increasingly have dense, multi-core, virtual-machine-intensive servers. As the network foundation of Cisco Data Center 3.0 and the latest addition to the family of data-center-class switches, the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series can meet these business, service, application, and operational requirements.

With these switches, you can:

• Consolidate the data center and protect investments in existing server, network, storage, and facilities assets.
• Decrease the total cost of ownership by simplifying the data center infrastructure.
• Increase business agility with easier, faster, and pervasive data center virtualization.
• Enhance business resilience with greater operational continuity.
• Use existing operational models and administrative domains for easy deployment.

The Cisco Nexus 5020 Switch foundation is built upon:

• High-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
• Data Center Ethernet.
• Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).
• Virtual-machine-optimized networking.

A broad group of industry-leading partners supports the open, standards-based unified fabric architecture of the Cisco Nexus 5020 Switch. This switch also delivers more than 1 Tbps of switching capacity with 40 fixed wire-speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports that support Data Center Ethernet and FCoE. In addition, two expansion ports support any combination of the following modules:

• 8-port 1/2/4 Gigabit Fibre Channel.
• 4-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet (Data Center Ethernet and FCoE) and 4-port 1/2/4 Gigabit Fibre Channel.
• 6-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet (Data Center Ethernet and FCoE).

The Cisco Nexus 5010 Switch foundation is built upon:

• High-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
• Data Center Ethernet.
• Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).
• Virtual-machine-optimized networking.

A broad group of industry-leading partners supports the open, standards-based unified fabric architecture of the Cisco Nexus 5010 Switch. This switch also delivers more than 500 Gbps of switching capacity with 20 fixed wirespeed 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports that support Data Center Ethernet and FCoE. In addition, one expansion port supports one of the following modules:

• 8-port 1/2/4 Gigabit Fibre Channel.
• 4-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet (Data Center Ethernet and FCoE) and 4-port 1/2/4 Gigabit Fibre Channel.
• 6-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet (Data Center Ethernet and FCoE).