Cisco Nexus 7000 Series vs Cisco Nexus 9500 Series Datacenter Switches
Today I am going to discuss about the high throughput Cisco Nexus switches and what are the purpose of these switch in the datacenter. I knew most of people know about the usage of Cisco Nexus 7000 series and Cisco Nexus 9000 series accordingly and they knew where and why these switches used.
Cisco Nexus 7000 series switch generally used in the datacenter for core and distribution purposes while Cisco Nexus 9000 series switch is used in ACI infrastructure. All these hardware supports the VXLAN and LISP protocols while Nexus 9500 series Switch is used as Spine in the ACI infrastructure in the datacenter.
Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switch
Cisco Nexus 7000 Series chassis actually use a passive mid-plane
architecture which will provide you a physical connectors and copper traces for
interconnecting the fabric modules and the I/O modules for direct data
transfer. All these intermodule switching is performed via the crossbar fabric ASICs
on the individual I/O modules and fabric modules. In the case of Cisco Nexus
7004 chassis, there are no fabric modules and the mid-plane provides the
connectors and traces to interconnect the fabric ASICs on the I/O modules
directly.
Fully distributed fabric architecture composed
of up to five fabric modules combined with the chassis midplane delivers up to
550 Gbps per slot for 8.8 Tbps, 9.9 Tbps, and 18.7 Tbps of forwarding capacity
in the 9-slot, 10-slot, and 18-slot switches, respectively. The 4-slot chassis
delivers up to 1.92 Tbps of forwarding capacity in combination with the
built-in fabric system.
Cisco Nexus 7000 Series uses power supplies that are up
to 90 percent efficient, so less power is wasted as heat, and more power is
available for the system to use than with typical power supplies.
Cisco Nexus 7000 series have various models
- Cisco Nexus 7004
- Cisco Nexus 7006
- Cisco Nexus 7009
- Cisco Nexus 7010
- Cisco Nexus 7018
Below is the diagram shows the existing Cisco Nexus fabric infrastructure into the extended Cisco ACI fabric. Cisco Nexus fabric uses Cisco nexus 7000 series switches and Cisco extended ACI fabric uses Cisco nexus 9000 series switches.
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Fig 1.1- Cisco 7000 series and Cisco 9000 series Nexus Switches Topology
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Cisco 9500 Series Switches
Cisco Nexus 9500 platform uses a Clos fabric design that
interconnects the line cards with rear-mounted fabric modules. Cloud scale
Technology powered N9K-C95xx-FM-E enables 100 Gigabit Ethernet spine
deployments. 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.
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 central points for the Gigabit Ethernet out-of-band channels (EOBCs) between the supervisors, fabric modules, and line cards.
Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-based application profiles. 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 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
Cisco Nexus 9500 series have various models
- Cisco Nexus 9504
- Cisco Nexus 9508
- Cisco Nexus 9516
Below is the comparison table between Cisco Nexus 7000 series and Cisco Nexus 9500 Series switches
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Fig 1.1- Comparison between Cisco Nexus 7000 and Cisco Nexus 9500 Series Switches
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