Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches create the network foundation for your next-generation Unified Fabric data center. Modular switches, including the Nexus 7000 and 7700 series, deliver a comprehensive Cisco NX-OS feature set and open source programmable tools for SDN deployments. They offer high-density 10, 40, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet with application awareness and performance analytics for the data center.

Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches offer one of the most comprehensive data center network feature sets in a single platform. They deliver high performance and density for core, aggregation, end-of-row, and top-of-rack server deployments in a highly resilient modular platform.

Remote Integrated Service Engine (RISE) is a new protocol being added to the Nexus 7000 and 7700 platforms through NX-OS (software upgradeable to existing devices), that integrates service appliances to be attached to Nexus 7000 Series switches with the same benefits as if the appliance was directly connected to the switch backplane, as if it were a dedicated service module. Cisco RISE establishes a communication path between the network data plane and the service appliance, simplifying deployments and optimizing data paths with better traffic visibility within the data center.

The innovative Cisco RISE technology tightly couples external service appliances, such as the Citrix ADC, formerly NetScaler ADC, to Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches, enabling more efficient and flexible delivery for layered network services. Cisco RISE integrates Citrix ADC, formerly NetScaler as a service module within the Cisco Nexus 7000 or 7700 platform switch, even though it remains a physically separate device. Architecturally, this virtual service module arrangement is enabled by embedded intelligent services that securely integrate the control planes of the Citrix ADC and Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches. Physically, the two devices can be attached either in direct mode, through a single interface, PortChannel, or virtual PortChannel (vPC), or indirect mode, through a switched (Layer 2) network. In either case, Cisco RISE establishes a secured Ethernet-based connection for control-plane interactions over a management VLAN. Cisco RISE then enables data-plane VLANs to allow the Citrix ADC to process application-data traffic.

Compelling technical and business-oriented advantages of Citrix ADC integration, enabled with Cisco RISE, with Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches include:

• Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) through simplified deployment, automated operation, and better sharing and utilization of centralized application delivery resources
• Investment protection afforded by the capability to use existing ADC appliances as fully capable, virtualization-aware components of a next-generation data center fabric
• Accelerated speed of application deployment and overall business agility enabled by used of a policy based network that can respond in real time to changing application requirements and newly provisioned resources
• Enhanced business resilience and scalability of application delivery services through the zero-service-loss architecture of the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series, enabling capacity and capability to be added without any downtime
• Significant reduction in capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenses (OpEx), thereby promoting business continuity and cost reduction

Features

Core Functions

With Cisco RISE, each device can retrieve and program the hardware and software tables of the other (for example, the forwarding tables, routing tables, and access control lists [ACLs]). This capability enables dynamic

reconfiguration of the network fabric to more effectively account for mobile workloads and additional, dynamically
provisioned application servers (among other possibilities), thereby allowing the modification of application traffic.

Additional Capabilities and Technical Benefits
Other technical capabilities and advantages of Citrix ADC and Cisco RISE integration with Cisco Nexus 7000 Series data center switches include:

Simplified provisioning: Autodiscovery and bootstrap capabilities reduce administrator involvement for direct-mode implementations from 30 steps to 8 steps: creating the port channel, allowing the control and data VLANs, and enabling desired Cisco RISE features on the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switch. After this provisioning is completed, all configuration on Citrix NetScalar occurs automatically (configuration of VLANs, PortChannels, management IP, etc.), eliminating the need to physically connect a serial cable to configure the device through a console cable.

Data-path optimization: APBR and RHI are just two examples of the possible use cases with the cross-device visibility and programming enabled by Cisco RISE. Administrators can use Cisco RISE capabilities to configure a broad range of other similar features to further automate and optimize delivery of network services in a dynamic data center.

vPC-attach mode: In direct-attach mode, Cisco RISE enables the Citrix NetScalar device to be dual-attached to the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches using vPC. This interconnection doubles the ADC bandwidth potential without requiring additional cabling. Cisco RISE centralizes provisioning and provides bootstrap and auto discovery processes, eliminating the need for duplicate Layer 2 configurations on Citrix ADC and manual verification of configuration synchronization between the switch and the ADC device.

ADC offload: Cisco RISE integration frees Citrix ADC resources from having to manage ADC flows to help ensure that they are routed back through Citrix ADC. Cisco RISE eliminates the need for source NAT in one-arm configurations while helping ensure client visibility at the application layer. This feature enables more customers to adopt one-arm configurations, which allows better sizing and scaling of Citrix ADC, while preserving client visibility at the application layer.

Enhanced application availability: Real-time route updates between Citrix ADC and the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switch eliminate route black-holing when application failures occur. By enabling Citrix ADC to deliver route health updates to the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switch through Cisco RISE, the solution allows customers to more easily deploy shared services within and across data centers at a significantly reduced cost of operation with greater availability than ever before.

Integrated multitenancy support: Cisco RISE integration spans multitenancy features on both platforms: virtual device contexts (VDCs) on Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches, and the capability to run up to 40 independent Citrix ADC instances on a Citrix ADC SDX appliance. This feature provides comprehensive flexibility to support multitenant scenarios, including the capability to set up Cisco Nexus VDCs and Citrix ADC instances in one-to-many, many-to-one, and a countless variety of many-to-many configurations.