Cisco N9K-C93180YC-EX Cisco Nexus 9300-EX and 9300-FX Platform Switches

Product overview

Based on Cisco Cloud Scale technology, the Cisco Nexus^® 9300-EX and 9300-FX platforms are the next generation of fixed Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches. The new platforms support cost-effective cloud-scale deployments, an increased number of endpoints, and cloud services with wire-rate security and telemetry. The platforms are built on modern system architecture designed to provide high performance and meet the evolving needs of highly scalable data centers and growing enterprises.

Cisco Nexus 9300-EX and 9300-FX platform switches offer a variety of interface options to transparently migrate existing data centers from 100-Mbps, 1-Gbps, and 10-Gbps speeds to 25 Gbps at the server, and from 10- and 40-Gbps speeds to 50 and 100 Gbps at the aggregation layer. The platforms provide investment protection for customers, delivering large buffers, highly flexible Layer 2 and Layer 3 scalability, and performance to meet the changing needs of virtualized data centers and automated cloud environments.

The platform hardware is capable of collecting comprehensive Cisco Tetration Analytics^™ telemetry information at line rate across all the ports without adding any latency to the packets or negatively affecting switch performance. This telemetry information is exported every 100 milliseconds by default directly from the switch’s Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). This information consists of three types of data:

● Flow information: This information contains information about endpoints, protocols, ports, when the flow started, how long the flow was active, etc.

● Interpacket variation: This information captures any interpacket variations within the flow. Examples include variation in Time To Live (TTL), IP and TCP flags, payload length, etc.

● Context details: Context information is derived outside the packet header, including variation in buffer utilization, packet drops within a flow, association with tunnel endpoints, etc.

The Cisco Tetration Analytics platform consumes this telemetry data, and by using unsupervised machine learning and behavior analysis it can provide outstanding pervasive visibility across everything in your data center in real time. By using algorithmic approaches, the Cisco Tetration Analytics platform provides a deep application insights and interactions, enabling dramatically simplified operations, a zero-trust model, and migration of applications to any programmable infrastructure. To learn more, go to https://www.cisco.com/go/tetration.

Cisco provides two modes of operation for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches. Organizations can use Cisco NX OS Software to deploy the switches in standard Cisco Nexus switch environments (NX-OS mode). Organizations also can use a hardware infrastructure that is ready to support the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI^™) platform to take full advantage of an automated, policy-based, systems-management approach (ACI mode).

Switch models

Table 1 summarizes the Cisco Nexus 9300-EX platform switch models.

Table 1. Cisco Nexus 9300-EX platform switches

The Cisco Nexus 93180YC-EX Switch (Figure 1) is a 1-Rack-Unit (1RU) switch with latency of less than 1 microsecond that supports 3.6 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth and over 2.6 billion packets per second (bpps). The 48 downlink ports on the 93180YC-EX can be configured to work as 1-, 10-, or 25-Gbps ports, offering deployment flexibility and investment protection. The uplink can support up to six 40- and 100-Gbps ports, or a combination of 1-, 10-, 25-, 40-, 50-, and 100-Gbps connectivity, offering flexible migration options. The switch has FC-FEC enabled for 25Gbps, and supports upto 3m in DAC connectivity. Please check Cisco Optics Matrix for the most updated support.

The Cisco Nexus 93108TC-EX Switch (Figure 2) is a 1RU switch that supports 2.16 Tbps of bandwidth and over 1.5 bpps. The 48 10GBASE-T downlink ports on the 93108TC-EX can be configured to work as 100-Mbps, 1 Gbps, or 10-Gbps ports. The uplink can support up to six 40- and 100-Gbps ports, or a combination of 1-, 10-, 25-, 40,
50-, and 100-Gbps connectivity, offering flexible migration options.

The Cisco Nexus 93180LC-EX Switch is the industry’s first 50-Gbps-capable 1RU switch that supports 3.6 Tbps of bandwidth and over 2.6 bpps across up to 32 fixed 40- and 50-Gbps QSFP+ ports or up to 18 fixed 100-Gbps ports (Figure 3). The switch can support up to 72 10-Gbps ports using breakout cables. A variety of flexible port configurations are supported using templates.

Table 2 summarizes the Cisco Nexus 9300-FX platform switch models.

Table 2. Cisco Nexus 9300-FX platform switches

The Cisco Nexus 93180YC-FX Switch (Figure 4) is a 1RU switch with latency of less than 1 microsecond that supports 3.6 Tbps of bandwidth and 1.4 bpps. The 48 downlink ports on the 93180YC-FX can be configured to work as 1-, 10-, or 25-Gbps Ethernet or FCoE ports or as 16-, 32-Gbps Fibre Channel ports[1], creating a point of convergence for primary storage, compute servers, and back-end storage resources at the top of rack.

The 6 uplinks ports can be configured as 40 and 100-Gbps Ethernet or FCoE ports, offering flexible migration options. All ports support wire-rate MACsec encryption[2]. The switch has FC-FEC and RS-FEC enabled for 25Gbps support.

The Cisco Nexus 93108TC-FX Switch (Figure 5) is a 1RU switch that supports 2.16 Tbps of bandwidth and over 850 mpps. The 48 10GBASE-T downlink ports on the 93108TC-FX can be configured to work as 100-Mbps, 1-Gbps, or 10-Gbps ports. The 6 uplinks ports can be configured as 40- and 100-Gbps ports, offering flexible migration options.

The Cisco Nexus 9348GC-FXP Switch (Figure 6) is a 1RU switch that supports 696 Gbps of bandwidth and over 250 mpps. The 48 1GBASE-T downlink ports on the 9348GC-FXP can be configured to work as 100-Mbps, 1-Gbps ports. The 4 ports of SFP28 can be configured as 1/10/25-Gbps and the 2 ports of QSFP28 can be configured as 40- and 100-Gbps ports. The Cisco Nexus 9348GC-FXP is ideal for big data customers that require a Gigabit Ethernet ToR switch with local switching.

The Cisco Nexus 9336C-FX2 Switch (Figure 7) is a 1RU switch that supports 7.2 Tbps of bandwidth and over 2.8 bpps. The switch can be configured to work as 1/10/25/40/100-Gbps offering flexible options in a compact form factor. All ports support wire-rate MACsec encryption[3]. Breakout is supported on all ports. Please see feature table below for more information.

The Cisco Nexus 93240YC-FX2 Switch (Figure 8) supports 4.8 Tbps of bandwidth and over 1.8 bpps. The 48 ports of downlinks support 1/10/25-Gbps. The 12 uplinks ports can be configured as 40- and 100-Gbps ports, offering flexible migration options. Breakout is not supported at FCS, but is on the roadmap. The switch is ideal for a non-oversubscribed solution in a compact form factor. The switch has FC-FEC and RS-FEC enabled for 25Gbps support.

Features and benefits

The Cisco Nexus 9300-EX and 9300-FX platforms provide the following features and benefits:

● High performance, scalability, flexibility, and security

◦ The platform provides wire-rate Layer 2 and 3 switching on all ports.

◦ Robust hardware system specifications feature 4-core and 6-core CPUs, a minimum of 24 GB of system memory (64 GB on 93180YC-FX model), and respectively 64-GB and 128-GB Solid-State Disk (SSD) drives on EX and FX models.

◦ The 40-MB buffer supports highly scalable data centers and big data applications.

◦ Flexible forwarding tables support up to 1 million shared entries on EX models and up to 2 million shared entries on FX models.

◦ Flexible use of TCAM space allows for custom definition of Access Control List (ACL) templates.

◦ IEEE 802.1ae MAC Security (MACsec) support on all ports of 9300-FX models with speed greater than or equal to 10-Gbps, allows traffic encryption at the physical layer and provides secure server, border leaf, and leaf-to-spine connectivity.

● Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) ^*

◦ The platform offers native line-rate VXLAN routing.

◦ The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) control plane provides scalable multitenancy and host mobility (refer to VXLAN Network with MP-BGP EVPN Control Plane for more information).

● Hardware and software high availability

◦ Virtual Port-Channel (vPC) technology provides Layer 2 multipathing through the elimination of Spanning Tree Protocol. It also enables fully utilized bisectional bandwidth and simplified Layer 2 logical topologies without the need to change the existing management and deployment models.

◦ The 64-way Equal-Cost MultiPath (ECMP) routing enables the use of Layer 3 fat-tree designs. This feature helps organizations prevent network bottlenecks, increase resiliency, and add capacity with little network disruption.

◦ Advanced reboot capabilities include hot and cold patching.

◦ The switches use hot-swappable Power-Supply Units (PSUs) and fans with N+1 redundancy.

● Purpose-built Cisco NX-OS Software operating system with comprehensive, proven innovations

◦ Open programmability supports built-in DevOps automation tools such as Puppet, Chef, and Ansible.

◦ Cisco NX-API supports a common programmatic approach across Cisco Nexus switches.

◦ Power-On Auto Provisioning (POAP) enables touchless bootup and configuration of the switch, drastically reducing provisioning time.

◦ Cisco Embedded Event Manager (EEM) and Python scripting enable automation and remote operations in the data center.

◦ Advanced buffer monitoring reports real-time buffer use per port and per queue, which allows organizations to monitor traffic bursts and application traffic patterns.

◦ Complete Layer 3 unicast and multicast routing protocol suites are supported, including BGP, Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), Routing Information Protocol Version 2 (RIPv2), Protocol Independent Multicast Sparse Mode (PIM-SM), Source-Specific Multicast (SSM), and Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP).

◦ Segment routing allows the network to forward Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) packets and engineer traffic without Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) Traffic Engineering (TE). It provides a control-plane alternative for increased network scalability and virtualization.

◦ Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE^**) N-Port Virtualization (NPV) support enables the network administrator to control domain IDs and points of management on a Fibre Channel network as it scales. This feature enables LAN and SAN converged networks on a lossless, reliable Ethernet network.

◦ Network traffic monitoring with Cisco Nexus Data Broker builds simple, scalable, and cost-effective network Test Access Points (TAPs) and Cisco Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) aggregation for network traffic monitoring and analysis.

◦ Automate the time-consuming tasks of creating, installing, and maintaining appropriate fabricwide switch configurations with the new Cisco Nexus Fabric Manager.

The Cisco Nexus 9300-EX, 9300-FX platforms offer industry-leading density and performance with flexible port configurations that can support existing copper and fiber cabling (Tables 3, 4 and 5).

Table 3. Cisco Nexus 9300-EX platform switch specifications

Table 4. Cisco Nexus 9300-FX platform switch specifications

Table 5. Cisco Nexus 9300-FX2 series switch specifications

Cisco NX-OS Software overview

NX-OS is a purpose-built data center operating system designed for performance, resiliency, scalability, manageability, and programmability at its foundation. It provides a robust and comprehensive feature set that meets the demanding requirements of virtualization and automation in present and future data centers. The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series uses an enhanced version of NX-OS with a single binary image that supports every switch in the series, simplifying image management. The operating system is modular, with a dedicated process for each routing protocol: a design that isolates faults while increasing availability. In the event of a process failure, the process can be restarted without loss of state. The operating system supports hot and cold patching and online diagnostics.

The software packaging for the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series offers flexibility and a comprehensive feature set while being consistent with Cisco Nexus access switches. The default system software has a comprehensive Layer 2 security and management feature set. To enable additional functions, including Layer 3 IP unicast and IP multicast routing and Cisco Nexus Data Broker, you must install additional licenses. The licensing guide illustrates the software packaging and licensing available to enable advanced features. For a complete list of supported features, refer to Cisco Feature Navigator.

Software requirements

The Cisco Nexus 9300-EX and 9300-FX platforms support the NX-OS operating system. NX-OS interoperates with any networking operating system, including Cisco IOS^® Software, that conforms to the networking standards described in this data sheet.

For the latest software release information and recommendations, refer to the product bulletin at https://www.cisco.com/go/nexus9000.

Specifications

Table 6 lists the performance and scalability specifications for the Cisco Nexus 9300-EX and 9300-FX platform switches. (Check the software release notes for feature support information.)

Table 6. Hardware performance and scalability specifications^*

Environmental properties

Table 7 lists the environmental properties, and Table 8 lists the weight for the Cisco Nexus 9300-EX and 9300-FX platform switches.

Table 7. Environmental properties

Table 8. Weight

Regulatory standards compliance

Table 9 summarizes regulatory standards compliance for the Cisco Nexus 9300-EX and 9300-FX platform switches.

Table 9. Regulatory standards compliance: safety and EMC

Supported optics modules

For details about the optics modules available and the minimum software release required for each supported module, visit https://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/modules/ps5455/products_device_support_tables_list.html.

Ordering information

Table 10 presents ordering information for the Cisco Nexus 9300-EX platform switches.

Table 10. Ordering information

Warranty

The Cisco Nexus 9300-EX and 9300-FX platforms have a 1-year limited hardware warranty. The warranty includes hardware replacement with a 10-day turnaround from receipt of a Return Materials Authorization (RMA).

Service and support

Cisco offers a range of professional, solution, and product support services for each stage of your Cisco Nexus 9300-EX or 9300-FX platform deployment:

● Cisco Data Center Quick Start Service for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches: This offering provides consulting services that include technical advice and assistance to help deploy Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches.

● Cisco Data Center Accelerated Deployment Service for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches: This service delivers planning, design, and implementation expertise to bring your project into production. The service also provides recommended next steps, an architectural high-level design, and operation-readiness guidelines to scale the implementation to your environment.

● Cisco Migration Service for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches: This service helps you migrate from Cisco Catalyst^® 6000 Series Switches to Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches.

● Cisco Product Support: Support service is available globally 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for Cisco software and hardware products and technologies associated with Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches. Enhanced support options delivered by Cisco also include solution support for Cisco ACI, Cisco SMARTnet^™ Service, and Cisco Smart Net Total Care^™* service.

For more information, visit https://www.cisco.com/go/services.

Cisco Capital financing

Cisco Capital^® financing can help you acquire the technology you need to achieve your objectives and stay competitive. We can help you reduce Capital Expenditures (CapEx), accelerate your growth, and optimize your investment dollars and ROI. Cisco Capital financing gives you flexibility in acquiring hardware, software, services, and complementary third-party equipment. And there’s just one predictable payment. Cisco Capital financing is available in more than 100 countries. Learn more.

For more information

For more information about the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series and latest software release information and recommendations, visit https://www.cisco.com/go/nexus9000.