While attending Cisco Live in London, I went to a session exploring the architectural details of the forthcoming Nexus 6000 data center switch. The Cisco Nexus 6000 closes Cisco's product gap in the cloud networking market and addresses the need for a leaf/spine networking architecture built around high-speed, low-latency Ethernet networking.

Cisco positioned the Nexus as a mid-range switch for aggregation but I can't see who would buy it for that reason. That said, here are details.

The 6000 series includes line-rate forwarding for all ports at any packet size. Cisco claims one microsecond port-to-port latency via cut-through switching for both 10 GbE and 40 GbE. The series offers 31 concurrent SPAN ports (which I find awesome because it provides a much needed boost to network visibility and analysis).