Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches
Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switches provide the foundation for Cisco Unified Fabric. These switches were designed to meet the requirements of mission-critical data centers as well as deliver exceptional availability, outstanding scalability, and a comprehensive Cisco NX-OS software data center switching feature set. They are a modular data center–class product line designed for highly scalable 1/10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet networks. These switches deliver continuous system operation and virtualized, pervasive services. Cisco Nexus 7000 series switches consist of modular Cisco Nexus 7000 and 7700 platform switches and support supervisor modules, fabric modules, and input/output (I/O) modules.
The supervisor module delivers control-plane and management functions. The supervisor controls the Layer 2 and Layer 3 services, redundancy capabilities, configuration management, status monitoring, power and environmental management, and more. It provides centralized arbitration to the system fabric for all line cards. The fully distributed forwarding architecture allows the supervisor to support transparent upgrades to I/O and fabric modules with greater forwarding capacity. Two supervisors are required for a fully redundant system, with one supervisor module running as the active device and the other in hot-standby mode, providing exceptional high-availability features such as stateful switchover and In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU) on mission-critical data center–class products.
The fabric modules provide parallel fabric channels to each I/O and supervisor module slot. All fabric modules connect to all module slots. The addition of each fabric module increases the bandwidth to all module slots up to the system limit of five fabric modules for 7000 platform switches and six fabric modules for 7700 platform switches. The architecture supports lossless fabric failover, with the remaining fabric modules load-balancing the bandwidth to all the I/O module slots, helping ensure graceful removal and insertion.
Cisco Nexus 7000 Platform Switches
Coupled with Cisco NX-OS, the Cisco Nexus 7000 platform switches deliver a comprehensive set of features with nonstop operation in four chassis form factors, as shown in Figure 2-3:
Figure 2-3 Cisco Nexus 7000 Series
- Eighteen-slot chassis with 18 front-accessible module slots and side-to-side airflow in a compact horizontal form factor with purpose-built integrated cable management.
- Ten-slot chassis with ten front-accessible vertical module slots and front-to-back airflow and an integrated cable management system.
- Nine-slot with nine front-accessible module slots and side-to-side airflow in a compact horizontal form factor with purpose-built integrated cable management.
- Four-slot chassis with all front-accessible module slots and side-to-back airflow in a small form factor with purpose-built integrated cable management.
All Cisco Nexus 7000 Series chassis use a passive mid-plane architecture, providing physical connectors and copper traces for interconnecting the fabric modules and the I/O modules for direct data transfer. All intermodule switching is performed via the crossbar fabric ASICs on the individual I/O modules and fabric modules. In the case of Cisco Nexus 7004 chassis, since there are no fabric modules, the mid-plane provides the connectors and traces to interconnect the fabric ASICs on the I/O modules directly.
A scalable, fully distributed fabric architecture composed of up to five fabric modules combined with the chassis midplane delivers up to 550Gbps per slot for 8.8Tbps, 9.9Tbps, and 18.7Tbps (terabits per second) of forwarding capacity in the 9-slot, 10-slot, and 18-slot switches, respectively. The 4-slot chassis delivers up to 1.92Tbps of forwarding capacity in combination with the built-in fabric system.
The midplane design on the 9-slot, 10-slot, and 18-slot chassis and the backplane design on the 4-slot chassis support flexible technology upgrades as your needs change, providing ongoing investment protection.
Cisco Nexus 7700 Platform Switches
The Cisco Nexus 7700 platform switches have operational and feature consistency with the existing Cisco Nexus 7000 platform switches, using common system architecture, the same Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) technology, and the same Cisco NX-OS software releases.
With more than 83Tbps of overall switching capacity, the Cisco Nexus 7700 switches deliver the highest-capacity 10-, 40-, and 100-Gigabit Ethernet ports, with up to 768 native 10Gbps ports, 384 40Gbps ports, or 192 100Gbps ports. This high system capacity is designed to meet the scalability requirements of the largest cloud environments.
Powered by Cisco NX-OS, the Cisco Nexus 7700 switches deliver a comprehensive set of features with nonstop operations in four chassis form factors (that is, 2-, 6-, 10-, and 18-slot), as shown in Figure 2-4. All 7700 chassis have front-accessible module slots with front-to-back airflow and an integrated cable management system.
Figure 2-4 Cisco Nexus 7700 Switches
A scalable, fully distributed fabric architecture uses up to six fabric modules to deliver up to 1.32Tbps per slot of bandwidth in the Cisco Nexus 7700 6-, 10-, and 18-slot switches on day one. In the case of the Cisco Nexus 7700 2-slot chassis, the fabric modules are not required since it uses a single I/O module. The midplane design on the 2-, 6-, 10-, and 18-slot chassis supports flexible technology upgrades as your needs change, providing ongoing investment protection.
