Hot on the heels of the big launches from HP and Nutanix Inc. at their respective events, it’s now Cisco Systems Inc.’s turn in the spotlight with the introduction of new solutions on the second day of its Live conference that bring its software-defined networking and cloud strategies much closer together. Leading the launch are two key additions to its flagship switch family.

The Nexus 3264Q and Nexus 3232C represent the latest improvement on Cisco’s top-of-rack formula, with both providing significant throughput improvements over the previous-generation models unveiled last year. But the latter stands out thanks to support for ultra-fast 100Gbps connectivity, which is only starting to enter the traditional enterprise.

That’s essential to supporting the requirements of analytic clusters and the other modern distributed workloads that are putting increased strain on the corporate network, which Cisco is specifically targeting with a new provisioning system introduced in conjunction. The software provides a centralized console for dividing transport capacity among applications that spans the entire Nexus series and comes integrated with management platforms such as OpenStack.

The decision to support the free framework underscores a focus on private clouds that’s also reflected in a new partnership with Microsoft that will see its infrastructure-as-a-service stack integrated with Cisco’s overarching Application-Centric Infrastructure platform. The software-defined networking architecture likewise overarches the Nexus family to allow for centralized control.

But the networking giant is not limiting its efforts to on-premise environments. It’s bolstering its hybrid cloud pitch, too, at the event with the launch of a major upgrade to the unified management framework underscoring its federated network of partner-provided and homegrown services. The arguably biggest addition is support for instances running on Amazon’s Virtual Private Network, which brings organization’s’ most important off-premise workloads into the fold.

At the same time, Cisco is also tightening the on-premise end of its hybrid equation through integration with OpenStack and Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor as well as an update for the Nexus 1000 series that makes it possible to extend on-premise network security policies to its federated cloud. That kills two birds with one stone, sparing administrators the trouble of setting up everything from scratch while providing a single point of control across their entire environments.

Photo via Cisco