Switches & Bridges

Get High Performance 40 and 50-Gb Switching

The 93180LC-EX is the industry's first 50-Gbps 1RU switch that provides flexible line-rate layer 2 and 3 feature sets. Designed with Cisco Cloud Scale technology, it supports flexible migration options. It is ideal for highly scalable cloud architectures and enterprise data centers, and operates in Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) mode.

Features and Capabilities

In ACI mode, the Cisco Nexus 93180LC-EX Switch has 24 x 40/50-Gbps Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable Plus (QSFP+) ports and 6x40/100-Gbps QSFP28 uplink ports. This 1RU switch supports 3.6 Tbps of bandwidth and over 2.6 bpps across 24 fixed 40/50-Gbps QSFP+ ports.

NX-OS support is available by CY17Q2

Architectural Flexibility

• Includes leaf node support for Cisco ACI architecture with flexible port configuration
• Includes top-of-rack, fabric extender aggregation, or middle-of-row fiber-based server access connectivity for traditional and leaf-spine architectures
• Increase scale and simplify management through Cisco Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender support

Feature-Rich

• Enhanced Cisco NX-OS Software is designed for performance, resiliency, scalability, manageability, and programmability
• ACI-ready infrastructure helps users take advantage of automated policy-based systems management
• Virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN) routing provides network services
• Real-time buffer utilization per port and per queue for monitoring traffic micro-bursts and application traffic patterns

Real-Time Visibility and Telemetry

• Cisco Tetration Analytics Platform support with built-in hardware sensors for rich traffic flow telemetry and line-rate data collection
• Cisco Nexus Data Broker support for network traffic monitoring and analysis

Highly Available and Efficient Design

• High-performance, non-blocking architecture
• Easily deployed into either a hot-aisle and cold-aisle configuration
• Redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and fan trays

Simplified Operations

• Preboot execution environment (PXE) and Power-On Auto Provisioning (POAP) support allows for simplified software upgrades and configuration file installation
• Automate and configure switches with DevOps tools like Puppet, Chef, and Ansible
• An intelligent API offers switch management through remote procedure calls (RPCs, JSON, or XML) over a HTTP/HTTPS infrastructure
• Python scripting gives programmatic access to the switch command-line interface (CLI)
• Includes hot and cold patching, and online diagnostics

Investment Protection

• Support for 40-Gb and 50-Gb access connectivity and 40-Gb and 100-Gb uplinks facilitate data centers migrating switching infrastructure to faster speeds
• A Cisco 40-Gb bidirectional transceiver allows for reuse of an existing 10 Gigabit Ethernet multimode cabling plant for 40 Gigabit Ethernet

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The Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™ solution in the data center is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-based application profiles. The Cisco ACI solution provides a robust transport network for today's dynamic workloads. Cisco ACI is built on a network fabric that combines time-tested protocols with new innovations to create a highly flexible, scalable, and resilient architecture of low-latency, high-bandwidth links. This fabric delivers a network that can support the most demanding and flexible data center environments.

The Cisco ACI fabric consists of three major components:

• Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC)
• Spine switches
• Leaf switches

Building on the success of first-generation Cisco Nexus® 9300 platform switches, the latest Cisco Nexus 9300-EX and 9300-FX platforms can collect comprehensive Cisco Tetration Analytics™ telemetry information at line rate across all ports without adding any latency to the packets or negatively affecting switch performance. This telemetry information is exported every 100 milliseconds (ms) 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 deep insights into applications and interactions, enabling dramatically simplified operations, a zero-trust model, and migration of applications to any programmable infrastructure.

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Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™) in the data center is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-based application profiles. Cisco ACI provides a robust transport network for today's dynamic workloads. Cisco ACI is built on a network fabric that combines time-tested protocols with new innovations to create a highly flexible, scalable, and resilient architecture of low-latency, high-bandwidth links. This fabric delivers a network that can support the most demanding and flexible data center environments.

The Cisco ACI fabric is designed from the foundation to support emerging industry demands while maintaining a migration path for architecture already in place. The fabric is designed to support the industry move to management automation, programmatic policy, and dynamic "workload-anywhere" models. The Cisco ACI fabric accomplishes this with a combination of hardware, policy-based control systems, and software closely coupled to provide advantages not possible in other models.

The Cisco ACI fabric consists of three major components:

• Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC)
• Spine switches
• Leaf switches

These three components handle both the application of network policy and the delivery of packets. Cisco Nexus® 9000 Series Switches support Cisco ACI, and organizations can use them as spine or leaf switches to take full advantage of an automated, policy-based, systems management approach.

The Cisco Nexus 9300 platform leaf switches for Cisco ACI are fixed-port switches designed for top-of-rack (ToR) and middle-of-row (MoR) deployment in data centers that support enterprise applications, service provider hosting, and cloud computing environments. These Layer 2 and 3 nonblocking switches support 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) with up to 2.56 terabits per second (Tbps) of internal bandwidth.

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Organizations everywhere recognize that changing application environments are creating new demands for the IT infrastructure that supports them. Application workloads are deployed across a mix of virtualized and nonvirtualized server and storage infrastructure, requiring a network infrastructure that provides consistent connectivity, security, and visibility across a range of bare-metal, virtualized, and cloud computing environments:

• Application instances are created dynamically. As a result, the provisioning, modification, and removal of application network connectivity needs to be dynamic as well.
• Business units demand accelerated application deployments. IT departments have to provide shared IT infrastructure to address time-to-market needs and to increase their return on investment (ROI).
• With organizations deploying a mix of custom, open source, and off-the-shelf commercial applications, IT departments must manage both security and quality of service (QoS) for environments that support multitenancy.
• Applications have been transitioning over time to a less monolithic, scale-out, multinode model. IT infrastructure that supports this model must scale with the speed of business and support both 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.

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

The Cisco Nexus 9300 platform consists of fixed-port switches designed for top-of-rack (ToR) and middle-of-row (MoR) deployment in data centers that support enterprise applications, service provider hosting, and cloud computing environments. They are Layer 2 and 3 nonblocking 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet switches with up to 2.56 terabits per second (Tbps) of internal bandwidth.

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Organizations everywhere recognize that changing application environments are creating new demands for the IT infrastructure that supports them. Application workloads are deployed across a mix of virtualized and nonvirtualized server and storage infrastructure, requiring a network infrastructure that provides consistent connectivity, security, and visibility across a range of bare-metal, virtualized, and cloud computing environments:

• Application instances are created dynamically. As a result, the provisioning, modification, and removal of application network connectivity needs to be dynamic as well.
• Business units demand accelerated application deployments. IT departments have to provide shared IT infrastructure to address time-to-market needs and to increase their return on investment (ROI).
• With organizations deploying a mix of custom, open-source, and off-the-shelf commercial applications, IT departments must manage both security and quality of service (QoS) for environments that support multitenancy.
• Applications have been transitioning over time to a less monolithic, scale-out, multinode model. IT infrastructure that supports this model must scale with the speed of business and support both 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.

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

The Cisco Nexus 9300 platform consists of fixed-port switches designed for top-of-rack (ToR) and middle-of-row (MoR) deployment in data centers that support enterprise applications, service provider hosting, and cloud computing environments. They are Layer 2 and 3 nonblocking 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet switches with up to 2.56 terabits per second (Tbps) of internal bandwidth.

Learn More