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A while back, I commented on Cisco's Nexus announcement, challenging its capacity and reliability claims.

Well Nortel has responded to Cisco with its own solution: the Virtual Services Platform 9000.

Unlike the Nexus, it supports a reliability scheme that is not restricted to 10 GigE links; Nortel's approach is based on Multi Link Trunking technology that is a key differentiator of Nortel's entire Ethernet solutions. The VSP 9000's virtualization capabilities are second to none- Zeus Kerravala of the Yankee Group says. "this switch is way ahead of its time in handling virtual environments.' And it supports VRF-Lite supporting multiple routing domains on a single VSP 9000, without MPLS complexity. Nortel claims it has designed VSP to scale to 100 Tbit/s in a quad switch cluster config.

The technology is great. But why did Nortel announce this a full year ahead of GA?

I can see three possible objectives:
1) Hold onto existing data center customers and get some trials going
2) Continue to demonstrate technology innovation to increase the value of Nortel's enterprise business
3) Provide some lead time to develop data-center-skilled go-to-market partners.

No mean task, but John McHugh, who lead Norte'ls data business, is bullish about the business.

For data centers, virtualization of network services over an IP fabric, simplifies data center design and management of networks to lower operational expenses, while also capping the cost of expanding available services and dramatically reducing energy consumption. In addition, optical SANs between data centers provide a very high level of disaster recovery and business continuity.

Although Fibre Channel (FC) is predominant in the data center today, the trend towards compute virtualization and 10GigE servers will drive the move to Ethernet as the preferred interconnect for storage. In fact, "2008 and 2009 will be the peak years for FC switch sales thanks to server virtualization and blade servers," according to Richard Villars, vice president, Storage Systems, at IDC.

Brocade's acquisition seems to be confirming these market trends.

Didn't know that Nortel is a player in this space!?

The NYSE has built its ultra-reliable, ultra-scalable Ethernet network on Nortel, while the Vancouver Olympic Committee for the 2010 Games is 100% reliant on Nortel. One financial institution has three data centers running Nortel, supporting over 35,000 PCs, tellers and ATMs, and hundreds of servers. In addition many of the largest global banks rely on Nortel for their inter data center optical SANs, delivered in partnership with storage leaders such as Brocade, EMC and IBM.