Over the previous decade, I’ve witnessed the explosion of client and enterprise purposes producing more and more huge quantities of information, which helped speed up the evolution of various knowledge middle architectures. The brand new designs enabled agile software innovation at scale whereas sustaining robust safety.
However assembly various international software calls for meant that knowledge facilities diversified enormously in dimension, capabilities, and geographic attain, which in flip created new operational challenges. The appearance of software-defined networking (SDN) marked a serious development in addressing these diversified software wants and created new alternatives for innovation.
Differing implementations, nonetheless, launched new operational complexities, corresponding to the necessity to optimize productiveness and handle prices extra successfully. Moreover, the fast adoption of AI additional difficult the panorama by introducing workloads with distinctive and demanding community necessities.
Inside this dynamic surroundings, knowledge middle operations groups are more and more in search of constant and cohesive experiences for managing and working quite a lot of knowledge middle networks. These groups search a unified resolution that streamlines provisioning, presents complete visibility, and allows proactive and reactive diagnostics. In addition they desire a resolution that delivers sturdy automation and minimizes the assault floor throughout knowledge middle perimeters.
Complete assist for various community materials
With these priorities in thoughts, Nexus Dashboard 4.1 (now common availability) allows full lifecycle administration of a number of knowledge middle networks via a single unified interface.
Nexus Dashboard 4.1 helps a variety of environments, together with:
- NX-OS VXLAN EVPN materials
- ACI materials
- AI materials
- Traditional LAN materials
- Media materials
- SANs
- Mixtures of those and extra
As well as, Nexus Dashboard goes past knowledge middle networks by enabling VXLAN EVPN automation on Cisco Catalyst switches operating Cisco IOS XE.

Unified software expertise
The Nexus Dashboard 4.1 launch marks a major milestone, because it has been fully redesigned and rebuilt. Nexus Dashboard 4.1 unifies Cisco Nexus Material Controller, Orchestrator, and Insights right into a single cohesive and intuitive software. All the capabilities are actually accessible via an built-in navigation menu and commensurate software programming interface (API) endpoint construction.

Unified administration airplane for the Cisco Nexus one material resolution
The platform now serves because the unified administration system for the Cisco Nexus one material resolution. It streamlines safety and segmentation insurance policies for group coverage object (GPO)-aware VXLAN materials, automates multi-fabric connectivity and interoperability between NX-OS VXLAN Ethernet digital non-public community (EVPN) and application-centric infrastructure (ACI) via software coverage infrastructure controller (APIC) federation, and allows seamless Layer 2/Layer 3 community extension with constant end-to-end coverage administration.

NetOps for Cisco N9300 Sequence Good Switches
Cisco N9300 Sequence Good Switches with built-in knowledge processing models (DPUs) convey safety and the community collectively like by no means earlier than. With Nexus Dashboard 4.1, N9300 Sequence Good Switches can now be onboarded into the Nexus Dashboard, which supplies NetOps providers, together with DPU well being monitoring, whereas Cisco Hypershield from the Hybrid Mesh Firewall suite supplies SecOps providers.

Centralized automation and visibility for AI materials
Cisco Nexus 9364E 800G switches act because the foundational constructing block of AI materials and are actually supported by Nexus Dashboard, enabling superior AI material automation. In addition they provide Cisco Clever Packet Move algorithms to maximise efficiency for each AI coaching and inferencing workloads.

Deployment flexibility and optimization
Nexus Dashboard now helps administration of a number of knowledge middle material varieties in the identical cluster. This permits versatile combos corresponding to NX-OS VXLAN EVPN and ACI materials or VXLAN EVPN and media materials. There isn’t a limitation to material kind combos. The one exception is (SAN) materials, which presently require a separate set up and will probably be built-in into future releases.
Scale up, scale down, and scale out
Expanded Nexus Dashboard kind issue choices can be found for each giant and small knowledge facilities, together with:
- 1-, 3-, or 6-node bodily or digital equipment clusters
- Digital equipment clusters in AWS
- The brand new Cisco ND-NODE G5S bodily equipment primarily based on Cisco UCS M8 servers for larger scalability
- Federation of a number of Nexus Dashboard clusters for scale-out
Dedicated to your knowledge middle journey
Nexus Dashboard adoption has grown considerably prior to now few quarters, with knowledge middle operations groups appreciating its robust technical and enterprise worth. We’ve obtained nice suggestions on Nexus Dashboard 4.1 throughout area trials and in one-on-one interactions and we’re dedicated to supporting your knowledge middle journey and simplifying your operations.
Please see the launch notes and configuration guides for a complete checklist of capabilities launched in Nexus Dashboard 4.1.
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