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Rajiv Ramaswami, vice president for the data-centre business unit at Cisco, said the network platform, the Cisco Nexus 7000 series, combines with the Catalyst 6500 series 10-gigabit Ethernet portfolio. With this integration, the firm will be able to provide customers with a migration to a new era of data-centre networking.

The Nexus 7000 series is the first series of switches designed to meet the requirements of data centres, with a 15-terabit-per-second switching capacity in a single chassis. Its unified fabric architecture combines Ethernet and storage capabilities into a single platform, designed to provide all servers with access to all network and storage resources. This enables data-centre consolidation and virtualisation.

"This will help customers to transform their data centres into a virtualisation environment that revolutionises how organisations adopt new IT strategies and respond quickly to changing business needs," said Ramaswani.

Bernie Trudel, head of data-centre technology at Cisco Asia Pacific, said the trend in data centres would become virtualisation and consolidation.

For network evolution, Cisco believed that development of storage, switching, servers and application environments would support the virtualisation environment, said Trudel.

Last year the firm spent US$1 billion (Bt33.4 billion) to support data-centre research and development and another $250 million for Nexus research and development.

The firm also plans to expand to small and medium businesses with a product portfolio called Smart Business Communications, which is a system that supports company growth, simplifies management, maintenance and training and increases efficiency with a lower total cost of ownership.

Mike Allen, senior director of Asia-Pacific channels, said to cover the new customers the firm had set up a new Cisco channel-partner programme.

Cisco now has over 500 partners for small and medium businesses. It plans to increase this to 1,000 partners in the Asia-Pacific region this year.

Cisco estimates that the Asean IT market for this group will reach $11.1 billion this year and the market will be the fastest growing segment of technology consumption over the next decade.

There are over 100 million small businesses globally. Within 20 years, this numbers will triple so there are opportunities to penetrate this market.

The Nation