Cisco Nexus 9300-FX2 Series Switches N9K-C9336C-FX2

Switch models

Table 1.        Cisco Nexus 9300-FX2 Series Switches

The Cisco Nexus 9336C-FX2 Switch (Figure 1) is a 1RU switch that supports 7.2 Tbps of bandwidth and over 2.4 bpps. The switch can be configured to work as 1/10/25/40/50/100-Gbps offering flexible options in a compact form factor. Breakout is supported on all ports. Please see feature table below for more information.

Figure 1.           

Cisco Nexus 9336C-FX2 Switch

The Cisco Nexus 9336C-FX2-E Switch (Figure 2) is a 1RU switch that supports 7.2 Tbps of bandwidth and over 2.4 bpps. The switch can be configured to work as 1/10/25/40/50/100-Gbps or as 16-, 32-Gbps Fibre Channel ports^[2] offering flexible options in a compact form factor. Breakout is supported on all ports. Please see feature table below for more information.

Figure 2.           

Cisco Nexus 9336C-FX2-E Switch

The Cisco Nexus 93240YC-FX2 Switch (Figure 3) is a 1.2RU switch that supports 4.8 Tbps of bandwidth and over 2.5bpps. 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. 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 over longer distances.

Figure 3.           

Cisco Nexus 93240YC-FX2 Switch

The Cisco Nexus 93360YC-FX2 Leaf Switch is an 2-Rack-Unit (2RU) Leaf switch that supports 7.2 Tbps of bandwidth and 2.4 bpps across 96 fixed 10/25G SFP+ ports and 12 fixed 40/100G QSFP28 ports (Figure 3). The 96 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. The switch has FC-FEC and RS-FEC enabled for 25Gbps support over longer distances. Please see feature table below for more information.

Figure 4.           

Cisco Nexus 93360YC-FX2 Switch

The Cisco Nexus 93216TC-FX2 Switch (Figure 5) is a 2RU switch that supports 4.32 Tbps of bandwidth and over 2.5bpps. The 96 10GBASE-T downlink ports on the 93216TC-FX2 can be configured to work as 100-Mbps, 1-Gbps, or 10-Gbps ports. The 12 uplinks ports can be configured as 40- and 100-Gbps ports, offering flexible migration options.

Figure 5.           

Cisco Nexus 93216TC-FX2 Switch

Features and benefits

The Cisco Nexus 9300-FX2 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 develops 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, and security

◦    Flexible forwarding tables support up to 1 million shared entries on FX2 models. Flexible use of TCAM space allows for custom definition of Access Control List (ACL) templates.

◦    IEEE 802.1ae MAC Security (MACsec^[1]) support on all ports of 9300-FX2 models with speed greater than or equal to 1-Gbps, allows traffic encryption at the physical layer and provides secure server, border leaf, and leaf-to-spine connectivity.

●      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.

●      RDMA over Converged Ethernet – RoCE support

◦    Platform offers lossless transport for RDMA over Converged Ethernet with support of DCB protocols:

◦    Priority-based Flow Control – (PFC) to prevent drops in the network and pause frame propagation per priority class.

◦    Enhanced Transmission Selection – (ETS) to reserve bandwidth per priority class in network contention situation.

◦    Data Center Bridging Exchange Protocol – (DCBX) to discover and exchange priority and bandwidth information with end points.

◦    Platform also supports Explicit Congestion Notification – (ECN) that provides end-to-end notification per IP flow by marking packets that experienced congestion, without dropping traffic. The platform is capable to track ECN statistics of number of marked packet that have experienced congestion.

●      LAN and SAN Convergence

◦    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.

●      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.

The Cisco Nexus 9300-FX2 series offer industry-leading density and performance with flexible port configurations that can support existing copper and fiber cabling (Table 2).

Table 2.        Cisco Nexus 9300-FX2 Series Switches specifications

² Typical and maximum power values are based on input drawn from the power circuit. The power supply value (for example, 750W AC power supply: NXA-PAC-750W-PI) is based on the output rating to the inside of the switch.

Table 3 lists the performance and scalability specifications for the Cisco Nexus 9300-FX2/FX2-E series switches. (Check the software release notes for feature support information.)

Table 3.        Hardware performance and scalability specifications³