In a constantly changing business environment, companies are calling upon their IT departments to help them reduce costs, improve productivity, and introduce ways to interact with their customer base. The Cisco Nexus 5500 platform extends the versatility of the switches and provides advances toward higher density, lower latency, and multilayer services. The Cisco Nexus 5500 platform is well suited for enterprise-class data center server access-layer deployments across a diverse set of physical, virtual, storage-access, and high performance computing (HPC) data center environments.