The newest Alibaba Cloud data center in Beijing uses Cisco technology. It comes as the Chinese cloud provider has vowed to “match or surpass” Amazon Web Services (AWS) by 2019.
Alibaba Cloud currently ranks no. 4, after AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google, according to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.
The new data center network uses the latest Cisco Nexus switches based on Cisco custom CloudScale chips. Cisco claims this technology provides better performance, lower energy use, and granular network telemetry to the customized 3.6 terabyte and 6.4 terabyte single-chip switches for data centers.
Additionally, Cisco provided technical support as Alibaba combined big data and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to collect and analyze network traffic data and performance indexes in real time.
The customized data center is an ongoing project, said Thomas Scheibe, director of data center switching at Cisco, in an email. “The goal is to continually develop and improve by deploying the latest technologies.”
In the future, the two companies plan to collaborate on other areas including data center interconnection, data traffic visualization, and network assurance.
“We’re very excited to be able to join hands with Alibaba for an innovative experiment on data centers in China’s Internet industry,” said Tuqiang Cao, VP of Cisco and CTO for Greater China, in a statement.
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