The 6600 switches are priced from US$4,699 to $17,999 and will be available in the first half of this year. The Services zl Module costs $5,995 and will be available in February.

To protect its own data center turf, Cisco is rolling out the Nexus 7018, Nexus 5010 and Nexus 2000 Fabric Extenders. The Nexus 7018 joins the Nexus 7000 Series with an 18-slot chassis that provides up to 16 I/O module slots supporting up to 512 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports -- twice the density of the Nexus 7010, which debuted a year ago.

The Nexus 5010 is a 28-port, 1RU switch supporting 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Cisco's version of a lossless Data Center Ethernet (DCE), FibreChannel over Ethernet (FCoE), and FibreChannel. These features enable it to consolidate traffic from local area networks, storage area networks and server clusters onto a single unified fabric, Cisco says.

The Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extender is intended to support an increasing number of servers and increased demand for bandwidth from each server. The Nexus 2148T Fabric Extenders connect to dual Cisco Nexus 5020 sSwitches and are designed to improve scalability by supporting up to 2,496 Gigabit Ethernet servers.

Enhancements for the Catalyst 6500 line include an in-service software upgrade and support for long-range integrated 10 Gigabit Ethernet optics to reduce the time needed for planned network maintenance and facilitate virtual machine mobility across data centers. The Catalyst switches will also be getting some new IOS software that allows them to control the energy usage of attached devices.