Via acquisition and new data center switch releases, Cisco Systems is pitching service providers hard on its vision for building and consolidating next-generation telco data centers.

At its partner summit last week, Cisco debuted the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series of data center-class switches, an edge-device companion to last year’s Nexus 7000 data center core switch. The Nexus 5000 was built with Nuova Systems; Cisco had previously invested in Nuova and last week announced it planned to acquire the remaining interest in the vendor.

The Cisco Nexus 5000 is focused specifically on data-center consolidation and enabling a “unified fabric” that simplifies cable infrastructure, reduces power consumption and simplifies network management, said Tom Keenan, Cisco director of marketing for service provider solutions. The Nexus 5000 supports 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching, as well as support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet, Carrier Ethernet and server virtualization. It can connect to either Cisco Nexus 7000 or Cisco Catalyst 6500 in the aggregation/core layers of the data center.

The Nexus product specifically and Cisco’s data center strategy in general are driven by several telco back-office trends. On the internal IT side, large carriers need to consolidate multiple data centers, most often brought in-house via acquisition. Optimizing the data center is also the key to supporting the customer-facing side of the business by creating an environment that can handle more dynamic, data-intensive services that must be supported by better-integrated back-office OSS/BSS systems, Keenan said.

“This is a great infrastructure to support either of those drivers” of back-office consolidation, Kennan said. The typical flow of new data center technology “through” a telco typically starts with a CIO implementing it in-house and then championing it as a way to provide better services to customers, he said. “Service providers don’t try anything on customers first,” he said.