Over the past decade, I’ve witnessed the explosion of consumer and business applications generating increasingly vast amounts of data, which helped accelerate the evolution of diverse data center architectures. The new designs enabled agile application innovation at scale while maintaining strong security.
But meeting diverse global application demands meant that data centers varied greatly in size, capabilities, and geographic reach, which in turn created new operational challenges. The advent of software-defined networking (SDN) marked a major advancement in addressing these varied application needs and created new opportunities for innovation.
Differing implementations, however, introduced new operational complexities, such as the need to optimize productivity and manage costs more effectively. Additionally, the rapid adoption of AI further complicated the landscape by introducing workloads with unique and demanding network requirements.
Within this dynamic environment, data center operations teams are increasingly seeking consistent and cohesive experiences for managing and operating a variety of data center networks. These teams seek a unified solution that streamlines provisioning, offers comprehensive visibility, and enables proactive and reactive diagnostics. They also want a solution that delivers robust automation and minimizes the attack surface across data center perimeters.
Comprehensive support for diverse network fabrics
With these priorities in mind, Nexus Dashboard 4.1 (now general availability) enables complete lifecycle management of multiple data center networks through a single unified interface.
Nexus Dashboard 4.1 supports a wide range of environments, including:
- NX-OS VXLAN EVPN fabrics
- ACI fabrics
- AI fabrics
- Classic LAN fabrics
- Media fabrics
- SANs
- Combinations of these and more
In addition, Nexus Dashboard goes beyond data center networks by enabling VXLAN EVPN automation on Cisco Catalyst switches running Cisco IOS XE.
Unified application experience
The Nexus Dashboard 4.1 release marks a significant milestone, as it has been completely redesigned and rebuilt. Nexus Dashboard 4.1 unifies Cisco Nexus Fabric Controller, Orchestrator, and Insights into a single cohesive and intuitive application. All of the capabilities are now accessible through an integrated navigation menu and commensurate application programming interface (API) endpoint structure.
Unified management plane for the Cisco Nexus one fabric solution
The platform now serves as the unified management system for the Cisco Nexus one fabric solution. It streamlines security and segmentation policies for group policy object (GPO)-aware VXLAN fabrics, automates multi-fabric connectivity and interoperability between NX-OS VXLAN Ethernet virtual private network (EVPN) and application-centric infrastructure (ACI) through application policy infrastructure controller (APIC) federation, and enables seamless Layer 2/Layer 3 network extension with consistent end-to-end policy management.
NetOps for Cisco N9300 Series Smart Switches
Cisco N9300 Series Smart Switches with built-in data processing units (DPUs) bring security and the network together like never before. With Nexus Dashboard 4.1, N9300 Series Smart Switches can now be onboarded into the Nexus Dashboard, which provides NetOps services, including DPU health monitoring, while Cisco Hypershield from the Hybrid Mesh Firewall suite provides SecOps services.
Centralized automation and visibility for AI fabrics
Cisco Nexus 9364E 800G switches act as the foundational building block of AI fabrics and are now supported by Nexus Dashboard, enabling advanced AI fabric automation. They also offer Cisco Intelligent Packet Flow algorithms to maximize performance for both AI training and inferencing workloads.
Deployment flexibility and optimization
Nexus Dashboard now supports management of multiple data center fabric types in the same cluster. This allows flexible combinations such as NX-OS VXLAN EVPN and ACI fabrics or VXLAN EVPN and media fabrics. There is no limitation to fabric type combinations. The only exception is (SAN) fabrics, which currently require a separate installation and will be integrated into future releases.
Scale up, scale down, and scale out
Expanded Nexus Dashboard form factor options are available for both large and small data centers, including:
- 1-, 3-, or 6-node physical or virtual appliance clusters
- Virtual appliance clusters in AWS
- The new Cisco ND-NODE G5S physical appliance based on Cisco UCS M8 servers for greater scalability
- Federation of multiple Nexus Dashboard clusters for scale-out
Committed to your data center journey
Nexus Dashboard adoption has grown significantly in the past few quarters, with data center operations teams appreciating its strong technical and business value. We’ve received great feedback on Nexus Dashboard 4.1 during field trials and in one-on-one interactions and we are committed to supporting your data center journey and simplifying your operations.
Please see the release notes and configuration guides for a comprehensive list of capabilities introduced in Nexus Dashboard 4.1.
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