NEW YORK (Reuters) - Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc on Monday launched a new switching product aimed at large data centers, and forecast strong sales despite worries of a slowdown in U.S. technology spending.

Cisco said the Nexus 7000, which combines ethernet switching and storage capabilities into a single product, is aimed at helping large corporate data centers handle and store increasing Internet traffic more efficiently.

The company, the top provider of routers and switches which direct Internet traffic, said consolidating ethernet and storage, as well as improving airflow and design, resulted in a more simplified and energy-saving product.

The Nexus 7000 also features an advanced operating system called NX-OS.

An explosion of consumer-generated content and a shift to Web-based software in day-to-day business operations means these data centers need to handle an increasing amount of Internet traffic.

Doug Gourlay, a senior director for Cisco's data center business unit, said the new product would help customers, including banks and large businesses as well as phone and Internet service providers, reduce energy consumption at data centers by around 8 percent.

That assumes data center-wide upgrade from conventional switching products, including Cisco's own, he said.

"IT's challenge is to maximize the workload within a given power budget," he said.

While he declined to give sales forecasts for the product which is priced at $75,000 and available from the second quarter of 2008, he forecast strong demand.

"The data center market is growing at twice the rate of traditional core switching market," Gourlay said.

He also said he did not expect sales to be hurt by any U.S. economic slowdown, which some analysts say could discourage companies from investing in infrastructure.

"If a budget is trimmed or curtailed, the data center is the last place that gets cut because it's the area that's most critical to keep a business running," he said.

"Nobody's giving a reprieve on the requirement to store data, information retention. And certainly there's a tremendous incentive right now for efficiency."

(Reporting by Ritsuko Ando; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
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