The Cisco® Nexus™ 7000 Series Switches comprise a modular data center-class product line designed for highly scalable 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks with a fabric architecture that scales beyond 15 terabits per second (Tbps). Designed to meet the requirements of the most mission-critical data centers, it delivers continuous system operation and virtualized, pervasive services. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series is based on a proven operating system, with enhanced features to deliver real-time system upgrades with no service disruption together with exceptional manageability and serviceability. Its innovative design is purpose built to support end-to-end data center connectivity, consolidating IP, storage, and interprocess communication (IPC) networks onto a single Ethernet fabric.

The Cisco Nexus 7000 Fabric Modules for the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Chassis are separate fabric modules that provide parallel fabric channels to each I/O and supervisor module slot. Up to five simultaneously active fabric modules work together delivering up to 230 Gbps per slot. Through the parallel forwarding architecture, a system capacity of more than 8 Tbps is achieved with the five fabric modules. The fabric module provides the central switching element for fully distributed forwarding on the I/O modules.

Features and Benefits
Switch fabric scalability is made possible through the support of from one to five concurrently active fabric modules for increased performance as your needs grow. All fabric modules are connected to all module slots. The addition of each fabric module increases the bandwidth to all module slots up to the system limit of five modules. The architecture supports lossless fabric failover, with the remaining fabric modules load balancing the bandwidth to all the I/O module slots, helping ensure graceful degradation.

The combination of the Cisco Nexus 7000 Fabric Module and the supervisor and I/O modules supports virtual output queuing (VoQ) and credit-based arbitration to the crossbar switch to increase performance of the distributed forwarding system. VoQ and credit-based arbitration facilitate fair sharing of resources when a speed mismatch or contention for an uplink interface exists. The fabric architecture also enables future support for lossless Ethernet and unified I/O capabilities. Table 1 summarizes the features and benefits of the Cisco Nexus 7000 Fabric Module.