The Cisco Nexus™ 7000 Series 48-Port Gigabit Ethernet Modules are highly scalable modules designed for performance driven mission-critical Ethernet networks. Cisco Nexus 7000 Series has both copper and fiber options for Gigabit Ethernet modules. The copper module is a 48-port 10/100/1000 Ethernet module with RJ45 connectors and the fiber module is a 48-port Gigabit Ethernet module with SFP optics.

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 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.

Features and Benefits
The Cisco Nexus 7000 48-Port Gigabit Ethernet Modules with 46 Gbps of bandwidth to the fabric are high-performance, highly scalable modules designed for mission-critical Ethernet networks. Populating the 18-slot chassis with these modules delivers up to 768 ports of Gigabit Ethernet in a single chassis. Populating the 10-slot chassis with these modules delivers up to 384 ports of Gigabit Ethernet in a single chassis. The Cisco Nexus 7000 48-Port Gigabit Ethernet Modules provide 48Gbps of local switching and are ideal for the access layer of a data center network, where high density, high performance, and continuous system operation are crucial.

All Cisco Nexus 7000 Series I/O modules contain an integrated forwarding engine. This architecture scales the forwarding performance of the chassis linearly by the number of I/O modules employed. The forwarding engine on the Cisco Nexus 7000 48-Port Gigabit Ethernet Modules are part of the Cisco Nexus 7000 M Series of forwarding engines.

The M Series forwarding engine on the Gigabit Ethernet modules delivers 60 million packets per second (Mpps) of Layer 2 and 3 IPv4 unicast forwarding or 30 Mpps of IPv6 unicast forwarding across all ports on a single I/O module. A 10-slot chassis with eight M Series I/O modules delivers up to 480 Mpps of forwarding. Multicast forwarding is built into the I/O module performing egress replication. The M Series forwarding engine also delivers access control list (ACL) filtering, marking, rate limiting, and NetFlow with no effect on performance. Powerful ACL processing supports up to 64,000 entries per module, where entries can address Layer 2, 3, and 4 fields in addition to new Cisco® metadata fields that employ security group tags (SGTs).

The Cisco Nexus 7000 48-Port gigabit Ethernet Module offers exceptional security with integrated hardware support for Cisco TrustSec. This includes line rate data confidentiality, data integrity and ACL processing for Security Group Tags. Data confidentiality and integrity conform to the IEEE MAC security standard (IEEE 802.1AE [MACsec]). All 48 ports on the module support the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher using a 128-bit key. New security ACLs are enhanced through hardware support for Cisco metadata headers capable of carrying SGTs. Security group ACLs (SGACLs) use SGT information to provide hardware-based enforcement of security policies. This removes dependencies on IP addresses thus improving scalability and simplifying manageability.

The fabric interface on the Cisco Nexus 7000 48-Port Gigabit Ethernet Module delivers 46 Gbps of bandwidth in each direction. Traffic destined for a different module is distributed across up to five fabric modules. At least one fabric module is required in the chassis. Two fabric modules installed in the chassis delivers fabric fault tolerance with no loss of bandwidth.

The Cisco Nexus 7000 48-Port gigabit Ethernet Module buffers data in virtual output queues before the data flows to the fabric. The data flow is controlled by a central arbiter on the supervisor module using a credit-based buffer design. This architecture offers a lossless fabric that delivers quality of service (QoS) and fairness across all ports, even during congestion.