Cisco Nexus 9300-EX Series Switches Data Sheet

 

Product overview

The Cisco Nexus^® 9300-EX Series switches belongs to the fixed Cisco Nexus 9000 platform based on Cisco Cloud Scale technology. The platform support cost-effective cloud-scale deployments, an increased number of endpoints, and cloud services. The platform is 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 series 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.

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 can also deploy the 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.        Cisco Nexus 9300-EX Series 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.

Cisco Nexus 93180YC-EX Switch

The Cisco Nexus 93108TC-EX Switch (Figure 2) is a 1RU switch that supports 2.16 Tbps of bandwidth and over 1.6bpps. 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.

Cisco Nexus 93108TC-EX Switch

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.

Cisco Nexus 93180LC-EX Switch

Features and benefits

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

●      Architectural Flexibility

◦    Industry leading Software Defined Networking Solution Cisco ACI^™ support.

◦    Support for standards based VXLAN EVPN fabrics, inclusive of hierarchical multi-site support (refer to VXLAN Network with MP-BGP EVPN Control Plane for more information).

◦    Three-tier BGP architectures, enabling horizontal, non-blocking IPv6 network fabrics at web-scale.

◦    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.

◦    Comprehensive protocol support for Layer 3 (v4/v6) unicast and multicast routing protocol suites, 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).

●      Extensive Programmability

◦    Day zero automation through Power On Auto Provisioning, drastically reducing provisioning time.

◦    Industry leading integrations for leading devops configuration management applications – Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SALT. Extensive Native YANG and industry standard OpenConfig model support through RESTCONF/NETCONF.

◦    Pervasive API’s for all switch CLI functions (JSON based RPC over HTTP/HTTPs).

●      High Scalability, flexibility

◦    Flexible forwarding tables support up to 1 million shared entries on EX models. Flexible use of TCAM space allows for custom definition of Access Control List (ACL) templates.

●      Intelligent Buffer Management

◦    The platform offers Cisco’s innovative intelligent buffer management, that offers capability to distinguish mice and elephant flows and apply different queue management schemes to them based on their network forwarding requirements in the event of link congestion.

◦    Intelligent buffer management functions are:

◦    Approximate Fair Dropping (AFD) with Elephant trap (ETRAP). AFD distinguishes long-lived elephant flows from short-lived mice flows, by using ETRAP. AFD exempts mice flows from the dropping algorithm so that mice flows will get their fair share of bandwidth without being starved by bandwidth-hungry elephant flows. Also, AFD tracks elephant flows and subjects them to the AFD algorithm in the egress queue to grant them their fair share of bandwidth.

◦    ETRAP measures the byte counts of incoming flows and compares this against the user defined ETRAP threshold. After a flow crosses the threshold, it becomes an elephant flow.

◦    Dynamic Packet Prioritization (DPP) provides the capability of separating mice flows and elephant flows into two different queues so that buffer space can be allocated to them independently. Mice flows, sensitive to congestion and latency can take priority queue and avoid re-ordering that allows to elephant flows to take full link bandwidth.

●      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

◦    Single binary image that supports every switch in the Cisco Nexus 9000 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.

◦    Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) is the network management platform for all NX-OS-enabled deployments, spanning new fabric architectures, IP Fabric for Media, and storage networking deployments for the Cisco Nexus^®-powered data center. Accelerate provisioning from days to minutes, and simplify deployments from day zero through day N. Reduce troubleshooting cycles with graphical operational visibility for topology, network fabric, and infrastructure. Eliminate configuration errors and automate ongoing change in a closed loop, with templated deployment models and configuration compliance alerting with automatic remediation. Real-time health summary for fabric, devices, and topology. Correlated visibility for fabric (underlay, overlay, virtual and physical endpoints), including compute visualization with VMware.

◦    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.

●      Cisco Tetration Analytics platform support

◦    The telemetry information from the Nexus 9300 Series switches 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: (a) Flow information, this information contains information about endpoints, protocols, ports, when the flow started, how long the flow was active, etc. (b) Inter-packet variation, this information captures any inter-packet variations within the flow. Examples include variation in Time To Live (TTL), IP and TCP flags, payload length, etc. (c) 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 Network Assurance Engine (NAE)

◦    Cisco NAE continuously verifies if the network infrastructure is operating as per policy intent and it leverages the power of mathematical models to reason on behalf of the operator in policy, configuration and dynamic state level. NAE can precisely indicate problems in the network, identify which application or part of network is impacted, root-cause the problem and suggest how to fix it. Its continuous verification approach transforms Day 2 Operations from reactive to proactive mode and it does so without using any packet data. NAE helps avoid outages by predicting the impact of changes, reducing network related IT incidents and shrinking the mean time to repair by up to 66%. NAE also helps assure network security and segmentation compliance. To learn more about NAE, visit https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/data-center-analytics/network-assurance-engine/index.html.

Product specifications

The Cisco Nexus 9300-EX series offer industry-leading density and performance with flexible port configurations that can support existing copper and fiber cabling (Tables 2).

Table 2.        Cisco Nexus 9300-EX Series Switch specifications

Table 3 lists the performance and scalability specifications for the Cisco Nexus 9300-EX series switches. (Check the software release notes for feature support information.)

Table 3.        Hardware performance and scalability specifications^*

Table 4 lists the environmental properties, and Table 5 lists the weight for the Cisco Nexus 9300-EX series switches.

Table 4.        Environmental properties

Table 5.        Weight

Table 6 summarizes regulatory standards compliance for the Cisco Nexus 9300-EX series switches.

Table 6.        Regulatory standards compliance: safety and EMC

Software Licensing and Optics Supported

The software packaging for the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series offers flexibility and a comprehensive feature set. 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. To meet customer requirements, licensing is available as both subscription and perpetual. The licensing guide illustrates the software packaging and licensing available to enable advanced features. For the latest software release information and recommendations, refer to the product bulletin at https://www.cisco.com/go/nexus9000.

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 7 presents ordering information for the Cisco Nexus 9300-EX series switches.

Table 7.        Ordering information

Warranty, Service and support

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

Cisco offers a range of professional, solution, and product support services for each stage of your Cisco Nexus 9300-EX series 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 environmental sustainability

Information about Cisco’s environmental sustainability policies and initiatives for our products, solutions, operations, and extended operations or supply chain is provided in the “Environment Sustainability” section of Cisco’s 2018 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report.

Reference links to information about key environmental sustainability topics (mentioned in the “Environment Sustainability” section of the CSR Report) are provided in the following table:

Reference links to product-specific environmental sustainability information that is mentioned in relevant sections of this data sheet are provided in the following table:

Cisco makes the packaging data available for informational purposes only. It may not reflect the most current legal developments, and Cisco does not represent, warrant or guarantee that it is complete, accurate or up-to-date. This information is subject to change without notice.

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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.