Evolving the Nexus 9000 to Enhance Today’s Social, Mobile, Cloud and App-Centric World

For most enterprises today, remaining competitive requires them to modernize their data center infrastructure to deliver operational services at the pace and scale of the cloud and DevOps. The Cisco Nexus 9000 is a key component of Cisco ASAP data center as a foundational element of the modern infrastructure that is optimized to transform enterprises into full-fledged digital businesses.

To help customers grow, consolidate, scale and to adapt to changing business needs, Cisco today is announcing significant advancements and enhancements to the Cisco Nexus 9000 portfolio. These innovations are built leveraging the flexibility of both custom ASIC (Cloudscale) intelligence and merchant silicon options, providing customers with choice in terms of price, performance, and capability options. These industry-leading options make the Nexus 9000 ideal for traditional data center environments or to fully automated, software-defined, hybrid cloud data centers.

The latest Cisco Nexus 9000 innovations include:

Fixed form-factor advancements: Cisco is introducing two new fixed platforms powered by Cloudscale ASIC and optimized for 25G and 50G configurations with 100G uplinks, support for flexible configurations and Tetration Analytics.

The Nexus 93180LC-EX is the industry’s first 50-Gbps capable 1RU switch that support 3.6 Tbps of bandwidth and over 2.6 bpps across 24 fixed 40/50-Gbps ports, 6 uplink ports can be configured and 40 or 100 Gbps.

The Nexus 92300YC is a high-density model offering 25-Gbps to 100-Gbps performance with flexible topology design that will be available in March 2017. This is a high-performance model capable of reaching 6.0 terabits per second of bandwidth and processing over 4.75 billion packets per second across 48 25-Gbps SFP28 and 18 100-Gbps QSFP28 ports. These performance thresholds make this switch ideal for 25 Gbps server access and 1:1 subscription networks, in a compact form factor.

Modular switch advancements: Cisco is also introducing new 100 Gbps modules for Nexus 9500 Series Modular platform powered by Cloudscale ASIC, more distance and are Tetration Sensors-ready.

The X9736C-EX offers up to 36 line-rate 100 Gbps ports, ideal for backbone and router interconnect

The X97160YC-EX scales to 48 1/10/25 Gbps SFP+ ports and up to four 40/100 Gbps QSFP+ ports. These options make these modules ideal for aggregation layer and enables greater distance for 25 Gbps deployments with RS FEC.

The new Nexus 9500-R Series line cards and fabric modules, using merchant silicon ASICs, provide highly scalable route tables and buffering that can be shared or dedicated per-port for better burst absorption. Specifically, Cisco is introducing the X9636C-R – 36 line-rate 100G Ports and the X9636Q-R – 36 line-rate 40G ports (NX-OS mode support only).

NX-OS Advancements: The Cisco NS-OX powers the industry’s highly programmable switch with open APIs, making it ideal for self-service application provisioning on demand. As part of today’s announcement, Cisco is introducing a number of NX-OS features to enable scale, security, seamless operations and high-performance, real-time analytics.An example of this is “streaming telemetry” that overcomes the limitations of polling data for network troubleshooting with a “push” model that provides near real-time access to monitoring data. Another is support for the new Cisco Tetration platform that uses behavior-based application segmentation to deliver one-click policy enforcement across data center, private, public clouds. The NX-OS enhancements also apply to a number of third-party platforms and technologies, befitting the Cisco commitment to open networking and industry-standard data models. The new additions include enhancements to VXLAN operations, administration and maintenance (OAM) features for installing monitoring, and troubleshooting VXLAN based overlay networks. Other enhancements include:

REST-based API updates to support VXLAN BGP-EVPN, Segment Routing, VPC, PortChannel,

Puppet/Chef types for PC, vPC, STP, Intelligent Traffic Director

Native OPEN FLOW agent, multi-controller support, match IPv6 headers

Open Config YANG data models and native NX-OS YANG data models

With Open NX-OS, Cisco continues to strengthen the open culture of development and operations (DevOps) and creating a more Linux-like environment in the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series. Customers can automatically provision and configure Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches by using POAP and PXE. With the support for Bash Shell, Secure Guest Shell, and LXC access, administrators are free to load both Cisco and third-party RPMs and daemons as they would on a Linux server

These advancements and the other existing features are critical to keep the Nexus 9000 in the lead as the preferring networking platform in today’s social, mobile, cloud and app-centric world. For a complete list of these and other Nexus 9000 features, please refer to the latest NX-OS datasheet or visit www.cisco.com/go/nexus.

Tony Antony
Sr. Marketing Manager