1. 

   W Boudville
   July 29th, 2010 - 22:33

   The Nexus 7000 is well covered by the text, which is directed at system administrators of data centers. The product gives impressive flexibility for the design of such centers.

   It also subsumes the now standard Layer 3 protocols like OSPF, BGP and ISIS. Essentially you as sysadmin do not have to know the fine grained details of how these protocols work. You can entrust much of this to Nexus. This is reflected in the text, which deliberately does not go into many specifics of the protocols.

   But given the complexity of Nexus, much of the text shows how management controls are used, with numerous examples that demonstrate a surfeit of network data available to you.

   The book emphasises Layer 3 features, though there is also considerable support for Layer 2. For security contexts, Cisco has also provided several abilities; including the use of SSH for secure communication with an NX-OS machine. Access Control Lists figure prominently, letting you do testing and analysis of IP traffic.

   For some sysadmins whose main concern is uptime, chapters 6 and 7 are the most germane. These describe how high availability is possible, with a concomitant ease of configuration. Which also reduces your administrative cognitive workload.

   The last chapter shows how Cisco is supporting the use of virtual machines in data centers. Cisco figures that this will be strongly adopted in many centers. The Nexus has been made compatible with using a hypervisor and with enforcing VM security.
   
   Rating: 4 / 5

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