Cisco on Thursday introduced new additions to its data center networking portfolio that address these needs and deliver unmatched architectural flexibility and scale for physical, virtual or cloud computing environments.

The new Cisco switching products consist of Nexus data center switches and MDS storage switches that connect servers, data storage, and corporate networks seamlessly within the data center and cloud. Cisco unveiled second generation capabilities for the Nexus 7000 family and Cisco FabricPath support for the Nexus 5500 switch; together they provide industry-leading data center fabric scalability, supporting over 12,000 10GbE server ports: double the next-best offering on the market at less than half the cost.

Cisco also added new switches with sub-microsecond latency to the Nexus 3000 ultra-low latency switching family, and introduced a virtualized version of its popular ASA security appliance to deliver consistent security for virtualized and cloud environments.

The announcements further advance Cisco’s fabric-based approach to delivering unique solutions to meet diverse data center requirements, from non-virtualized “bare metal” environments, to highly virtualized data centers, Cloud-based architectures, Web 2.0 and “Big Data” environments that manage huge data sets.