Product Overview

Changing application environments are placing new demands on your IT infrastructure. With application workloads deployed across a mix of virtualized and nonvirtualized server and storage infrastructures, your network must provide constant connectivity, security, and visibility across bare-metal, virtualized, and cloud computing environments. For example:

●   Application instances are created dynamically, so provisioning, modification, and removal of application network connectivity also need to be dynamic.

●   With business units demanding accelerated application deployments, your IT department needs to provide a shared IT infrastructure that addresses time-to-market needs and an increased return on investment (ROI).

●   When you deploy a mix of custom, open source, and off-the-shelf commercial applications, your IT department must manage security and quality of service (QoS) for environments that support multitenancy.

●   With applications transitioning to a less monolithic, scale-out, multinode model, your IT infrastructure must scale with the speed of business and provide support for both 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.

The Cisco Nexus^® 9000 Series Switches include modular and fixed-port switches that overcome these challenges with a flexible, agile, low-cost, application centric infrastructure.

The Cisco Nexus 9500 switching platform (Figure 1) offers three modular options: the Cisco Nexus 9504 Switch with 4 slots, the Cisco Nexus 9508 Switch with 8 slots, and the Cisco Nexus 9516 Switch with 16 slots. All three switches use the same supervisor, system controller, power supplies, and line cards^[1]. The Cisco Nexus 9500 platform consists of Layer 2 and 3 nonblocking Ethernet switches with backplane bandwidth of up to 60 terabits per second (Tbps), the Cisco Nexus 9504, 9508, and 9516 Switches support 1, 10, 40, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces through a comprehensive selection of modular line cards. Configurable with up to 2304 10 Gigabit Ethernet, 576 40 Gigabit Ethernet ports or 128 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports, they provide ample capacity for both access- and aggregation-layer deployments.

There are two modes of operation for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series. Organizations can use Cisco^® NX-OS Software with the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series in standard Cisco Nexus switch environments. They can also use the application-centric infrastructure (ACI)-ready hardware infrastructure to take full advantage of an automated, policy-based, systems management approach. This data sheet covers standard Cisco Nexus switch deployment scenarios.

Cisco Nexus 9500 Platform Features and Benefits

The Cisco Nexus 9500 is a modular chassis that supports up to 16 line cards, 2 supervisor modules, 2 chassis controllers, 3 fan trays, 6 fabric modules, and 10 power supplies. The switch supports comprehensive Layer 2 and 3 functions on nonblocking 1, 10, 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports.

Table 1.       Cisco Nexus 9500 Platform Features and Benefits

Cisco Nexus 9500 Platform Components

The Cisco Nexus 9500 platform is built using the components illustrated in Figure 2 and described in the following sections.

Cisco Nexus 9500 Platform Line Cards for Non-ACI Deployments

The Cisco Nexus 9500 platform supports a variety of line cards, all able to be configured in any combination (Table 2).

Table 2.       Cisco Nexus 9500 Line Cards

Cisco Nexus 9500 Platform Fabric Modules and Performance

The Cisco Nexus 9500 platform has a Clos fabric design that interconnects the line cards with rear-mounted fabric modules. It supports up to six fabric modules, each with up to 10 24-Tbps line-rate packet forwarding capacity. All fabric cards are directly connected to all line cards. With load balancing across fabric cards, the architecture achieves optimal bandwidth distribution within the chassis. See Table 3 for ordering information.

Table 3.       Cisco Nexus 9500 Line Cards and Fabric Modules

Note:

Cisco Nexus 9500 Platform Supervisor Module

A pair of redundant supervisor modules manages all switch operations using a state-synchronized active-standby model. The supervisor accepts an external clock and supports management through multiple ports, including two USB ports, a serial console, and a 10/100/1000-Mbps network port. Two supervisors are available to provide deployment options:

Supervisor A: 4-Core, 1.8GHz x86 CPU, 16 GB of RAM and 64 GB solid state drive (SSD)

Supervisor B: 6-Core, 2.2GHz x86 CPU, 24 GB of RAM and 256 GB solid state drive (SSD)

Either supervisor can be used in NX-OS deployments, but Supervisor B provides additional compute and storage for enhanced performance. Redundant supervisors need to be of same type within a chassis.

Cisco Nexus 9500 Platform System Controller

A pair of redundant system controllers offloads chassis management functions from the supervisor modules. The controllers are responsible for managing power supplies and fan trays and are a central point for the Gigabit Ethernet out-of-band channel (EOBC) between the supervisors, fabric modules, and line cards.

Cisco Nexus 9500 Platform Power Supply

The Cisco Nexus 9500 platform supports up to ten hot-swappable, front-panel-accessible power supplies. A fully loaded chassis can operate with two 3000W AC power supplies. N+1 and N+N redundancy modes are supported. The 3000W AC power supply is 80 Plus Platinum rated, providing more than 90 percent efficiency across typical workloads.

The additional four power supply slots are not needed with existing line cards but offer headroom to support higher-bandwidth line cards in the future. Two power supplies are available to provide deployment options:

N9K-PAC-3000W-B Nexus 9500 3000W Standard 200-240v AC PS, Port Side Intake

N9K-PUV-3000W-B Nexus 9500 3000W Universal AC/DC PS, Port Side Intake. This power supply can be used for 180-305VAC or 192-400VDC deployments.

Cisco Nexus 9500 Platform Fan Trays

Three hot-swappable fan trays support front-to-back cooling. Each fan tray covers two fabric modules and can be removed for access.

Deployment Scenarios

The Cisco Nexus 9500 platform is a versatile data center switching platform. Switches can operate as EoR access-layer switches deployed with or without Cisco fabric extender technology, as aggregation-layer switches in traditional hierarchical network architecture, or as leaf or spine switches in a horizontally scaled leaf-and-spine architecture.

End-of-Row Access-Layer Switch

Configured as EoR access-layer switches (Figure 3), Cisco Nexus 9500 platform switches can connect to almost any blade or rack server through 100 Megabit Ethernet, 1 Gigabit Ethernet, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections, including:

●   Third-party and standalone Cisco Unified Computing System^™ (Cisco UCS^®) rack servers

●   Third-party blade server chassis with chassis-resident switches or pass-through devices

●   Cisco UCS

The Cisco Nexus 9500 offers an easy upgrade path from the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series, bringing the features, reliability, scalability, and availability of Cisco NX-OS Software platforms to existing EoR configurations. With support for 100 Megabit Ethernet, 1 Gigabit Ethernet, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet copper connectivity, it supports the transition from 1 to 10 Gigabit Ethernet one server or rack at a time.

For example, equipped with eight 48-port 1 and 10GBASE-T line cards, each Cisco Nexus 9508 can service up to 384 servers, with 32 40 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks available for server access or uplinks to the aggregation tier.

Aggregation-Layer Switch

The Cisco Nexus 9500 platform switches can act as aggregation-layer switches in traditional hierarchical architectures (Figure 5). Because the Cisco Nexus 9500 platform can host 10, 40, and (future) 100 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, organizations have the flexibility to build new infrastructures or use the switches as slide-in replacements with increased bandwidth and functions, using existing copper and optical cables.

●   Uplinks: 100 Gigabit Ethernet and 40 Gigabit Ethernet Ethernet-to-core switching layer connectivity is supported. The migration path offered by the Cisco Nexus 9500 platform prepares data center networks for future capacity growth.

●   Downlinks: 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to existing Cisco and third-party switches allows the switch to use the existing infrastructure and integrate with top-of-row (ToR), EoR, or MoR access-layer switches. 40 Gigabit Ethernet capability pairs the Cisco Nexus 9500 platform in the aggregation layer with 40 Gigabit Ethernet uplink ports on the Cisco Nexus 9300 platform switches with fixed access ports. Using 40-Gbps of connectivity on existing fiber pairs dramatically simplifies the evolution to greater per-rack bandwidth without the cost and complexity of upgrading the data center cable plant.

Leaf-and-Spine Architecture

The Cisco Nexus 9500 platform can serve as a leaf or a spine in network architectures (Figure 6). With their Layer 3 capabilities, Cisco Nexus 9500 and 9300 platforms can be used with Equal-Cost Multipath (ECMP) routing to accelerate the flow of traffic and reduce reconvergence time in the event of a failure. Redundancy in leaf-and-spine architectures offer increased availability with highly flexible workload placement. Depending on your deployment requirements, the leaf-and-spine design can be implemented in Cisco NX-OS or ACI mode. For additional information about Cisco ACI mode refer to Cisco Nexus 9500 Platform Application-Centric Infrastructure Switches Data Sheet.

Cisco NX-OS Software Overview

Cisco NX-OS is a purpose-built operating system for the data center designed for performance, resiliency, scalability, manageability, and programmability. Cisco NX-OS provides a robust and comprehensive feature set that meets the demanding requirements of virtualization and automation in existing and future data centers. Cisco NX-OS Software for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches works in two modes;

●   Standalone Cisco NX-OS deployment

●   Cisco ACI deployment

The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series uses an enhanced version of Cisco NX-OS Software with a single binary image that supports every switch in the series to simplify image management. The operating system is modular, with a dedicated process for each routing protocol that isolates faults while increasing availability. In the event of a process failure, the process can be restarted without losing state. The operating system supports patching and online diagnostics. In the event of a supervisor module failure, the software supports stateful switchover with continuous availability.

Main switch features include the following:

●   Power-On Auto Provisioning (POAP) automates the process of upgrading software images and installing configuration files on Cisco Nexus switches that are deployed in the network for the first time.

●   Intelligent Application Programming Interface (NX-API) provides operators with a means to manage the switch through remote procedure calls (RPCs), JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or XML over a HTTP/HTTPS infrastructure.

●   Linux shell access enables the switch to be configured through Linux shell scripts, helping automate and ensure consistency when configuring multiple switches.

●   Cisco NX-OS can be patched without any interruption in switch operations.

●   Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) bridging and routing, supporting and accelerating communication between virtual and physical servers across multiple data centers.

●   The Cisco ACI image enables the Cisco ACI spine-and-leaf architecture with Cisco Nexus 9500 platform in spine role. Powered with the Opflex-enabled Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and open controllers such as OpenStack, this deployment model dramatically reduces time-to-service delivery, automated network provisioning, and real-time telemetry correlation between the virtual and physical infrastructure.