Cisco Nexus® 7000 Series Switches combine high levels of scalability with operational flexibility.

Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches provide the foundation for Cisco® Unified Fabric. They are a modular data center-class product line designed for highly scalable 1/10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet networks with a fabric architecture that scales beyond 17 terabits per second (Tbps). Designed to meet the requirements of the most mission-critical data centers, the switches deliver continuous system operation and virtualized, pervasive services. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series is based on the proven Cisco NX-OS Software operating system, with enhanced features to deliver real-time system upgrades with exceptional manageability and serviceability.

The first in the next generation of switch platforms, the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series (Figure 1) provides integrated resilience combined with features optimized specifically for the data center for availability, reliability, scalability, and ease of management.

Features and Benefits

Coupled with Cisco NX-OS, the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series delivers a comprehensive set of features with nonstop operation in four chassis form factors:

- 18-slot chassis with 18 front-accessible module slots and side-to-side airflow in a compact horizontal form factor with purpose-built integrated cable management.
- 10-slot chassis with 10 front-accessible vertical module slots and front-to-back airflow and an integrated cable management system.
- 9-slot with 9 front-accessible module slots and side-to-side airflow in a compact horizontal form factor with purpose-built integrated cable management.
- 4-slot chassis with all front-accessible module slots and side-to-back airflow in a small form factor with purpose-built integrated cable management.

All Cisco Nexus 7000 Series chassis use a passive mid-plane architecture, providing physical connectors and copper traces for interconnecting the fabric modules and the I/O modules for direct data transfer. All 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, since there are no fabric modules, the mid-plane provides the connectors and traces to interconnect the fabric ASICs on the I/O modules directly.

A scalable, 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.

The midplane design on the 9-slot, 10-slot, and 18-slot chassis and the backplane design on the 4-slot chassis support flexible technology upgrades as your needs change, providing ongoing investment protection.

Cisco Nexus 7000 9-Slot Switch Chassis

- The Cisco Nexus 7000 9-Slot chassis with up to seven I/O module slots supports up to 336 x 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 42 x 40 Gigabit Ethernet ports, and 14 x 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports, meeting the demands of mission-critical campus core and data center deployments. It has two dedicated supervisor slots to provide full redundancy.
- Side-to-side airflow increases the system density in a 14RU footprint, optimizing the use of rack space. The optimized density provides the capability to stack up to three 9-slot chassis in a 42RU rack.
- Independent variable-speed system and fabric fans provide efficient cooling capacity to the entire system. Fan-tray redundancy features help ensure reliability of the system and support for hot swapping of fan trays.
- I/O modules, supervisor modules, and fabric modules are accessible from the front. Power supplies and fan trays are accessible from the back.