Cisco Nexus 9300-GX Series Switches Cisco N9K-C9316D-GX

Product overview

Based on Cisco® Cloud Scale technology, the Cisco Nexus® 9300-GX switches are the next generation of fixed Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches capable of supporting 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GE). With the increase in use cases for applications requiring Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), the platform addresses the need for high-performance, power-efficient, compact switches in the networking infrastructure. These switches are designed to support 100G and 400G fabrics for mobile service provider environments, including the network edge, 5G, IoT, Professional Media Networking platform (PMN), and Network Functions Virtuapization (NFV) The platform introduces a backward-compatible 400G optical interface Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable – Double Density (QSFP-DD) to transparently migrate existing data center fabrics from 40-Gbps and 100-Gbps speeds to 400 Gbps and also offers various lower port speeds and densities, including 10, 25, 50, and 200 Gbps using breakouts. The Cisco Nexus 9300-GX provides investment protection for customers, delivering higher performance to meet scaled out spine-leaf fabrics to support growing traffic for cloud applications.

Cisco provides two modes of operation for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches. Organizations can deploy Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI®) or Cisco NX-OS mode.

Cisco ACI is a holistic, intent-driven architecture with centralized automation and policy-based application profiles. It provides a robust, transport network for dynamic workloads and 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.

Designed for the programmable network, the Cisco NX-OS operating system automates configuration and management for customers who want to take advantage of the DevOps operation model and tool sets.

Cisco Nexus 9300 switches

Cisco Nexus N9K-C9316D-GX Switch is a 1RU switch that supports 12.8 Tbps of bandwidth and over 4.3 bpps. The switch can be configured to work as 10/25/40/50/100/200/400-Gbps offering flexible options in a compact form factor. Please see feature table below for more information.

Features and benefits

The Cisco Nexus 9300-GX Series provides the following features and benefits:

● Architectural flexibility

◦ Industry-leading Cisco Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution and Cisco ACI^® support

◦ Support for standards-based VXLAN EVPN fabrics, inclusive of hierarchical multi-site support (refer to VXLAN network with MP-BGP EVPN control plane for more information)

◦ Three-tier BGP architectures, enabling horizontal, non-blocking IPv6 network fabrics at web scale

◦ Segment Routing (SR and SRv6) allows the network to forward Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) packets and engineer traffic without Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) Traffic Engineering (TE). It provides a control-plane alternative for increased network scalability and virtualization

◦ Comprehensive protocol support for Layer 3 (v4 and v6) unicast and multicast routing protocol suites, including BGP, Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), Routing Information Protocol Version 2 (RIPv2), Protocol Independent Multicast Sparse Mode (PIM-SM), Source-Specific Multicast (SSM), and Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP)

● Extensive programmability

◦ Day-zero automation through Power On Auto Provisioning (POAP), drastically reducing provisioning time

◦ Industry-leading integrations for leading DevOps configuration management applications, such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and SALT. Extensive native YANG and industry-standard OpenConfig model support through RESTCONF/NETCONF

◦ Pervasive APIs for all switch Command-Line Interface (CLI) functions (JSON-based RPC over HTTP/HTTPs)

● High scalability, flexibility, and security

◦ Flexible forwarding tables support up to one million shared entries on GX models. Flexible use of TCAM space allows for custom definition of Access Control List (ACL) templates

● Intelligent buffer management

◦ The platform offers Cisco’s innovative intelligent buffer management, which offers the capability to distinguish mice and elephant flows and apply different queue management schemes to them based on their network forwarding requirements in the event of link congestion

◦ Intelligent buffer management functions include:

◦ Approximate Fair Dropping (AFD) with Elephant Trap (ETRAP). AFD distinguishes long-lived elephant flows from short-lived mice flows, by using ETRAP. AFD exempts mice flows from the dropping algorithm so that mice flows will get their fair share of bandwidth without being starved by bandwidth-hungry elephant flows. Also, AFD tracks elephant flows and subjects them to the AFD algorithm in the egress queue to grant them their fair share of bandwidth

◦ ETRAP measures the byte counts of incoming flows and compares this against the user-defined ETRAP threshold. After a flow crosses the threshold, it becomes an elephant flow

◦ Dynamic Packet Prioritization (DPP) provides the capability of separating mice flows and elephant flows into two different queues so that buffer space can be allocated to them independently. Mice flows—sensitive to congestion and latency—can take priority queue and avoid re-ordering that allows the elephant flows to take full link bandwidth

● Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over converged Ethernet – RoCE support

◦ The platform offers lossless transport for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over converged Ethernet with support of Data Center Bridging (DCB) protocols:

◦ Priority-based Flow Control (PFC) prevents drops in the network and pause-frame propagation per priority class

◦ Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) reserves bandwidth per priority class in network contention situations

◦ Data Center Bridging Exchange Protocol (DCBX) can discover and exchange priority and bandwidth information with endpoints

◦ The platform also supports Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), which provides end-to-end notification per IP flow by marking packets that experienced congestion, without dropping traffic. The platform is capable of tracking ECN statistics, including the number of marked packets that have experienced congestion

● LAN and SAN convergence

◦ Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) N-Port Virtualization (NPV) support enables the network administrator to control domain IDs and points of management on a Fibre Channel network as it scales. This feature enables LAN and SAN-converged networks on a lossless, reliable Ethernet network

● Hardware and software high availability

◦ Virtual Port-Channel (vPC) technology provides Layer 2 multipathing through the elimination of Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). It also enables fully utilized bisectional bandwidth and simplified Layer 2 logical topologies without the need to change the existing management and deployment models

◦ The 64-way Equal-Cost MultiPath (ECMP) routing enables the use of Layer 3 fat-tree designs. This feature helps organizations prevent network bottlenecks, increase resiliency, and add capacity with little network disruption

◦ Advanced reboot capabilities include hot and cold patching

◦ The switches use hot-swappable Power-Supply Units (PSUs) and fans with N+1 redundancy

● Purpose-built Cisco NX-OS Software operating system with comprehensive, proven innovations

◦ A single binary image supports every switch in the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series, simplifying image management. The operating system is modular, with a dedicated process for each routing protocol: a design that isolates faults while increasing availability. In the event of a process failure, the process can be restarted without loss of state. The operating system supports hot and cold patching and online diagnostics

◦ Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) is the network management platform for all Cisco NX-OS-enabled deployments, spanning new fabric architectures, IP Fabric for Media, and storage networking deployments for the Cisco Nexus-powered data center. Accelerate provisioning from days to minutes and simplify deployments from day zero through day N. Reduce troubleshooting cycles with graphical operational visibility for topology, network fabric, and infrastructure. Eliminate configuration errors and automate ongoing change in a closed loop, with templated deployment models and configuration compliance alerting with automatic remediation. Enjoy a real-time health summary for fabric, devices, and topology. Correlated visibility for fabric (underlay, overlay, virtual and physical endpoints), including compute visualization with VMware

◦ Network traffic monitoring with Cisco Nexus Data Broker builds simple, scalable, and cost-effective network Test Access Points (TAPs) and Cisco Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) aggregation for network traffic monitoring and analysis

● Cisco Network Assurance Engine (NAE)

◦ Cisco NAE continuously verifies if the network infrastructure is operating as per policy intent. It leverages the power of mathematical models to reason on behalf of the operator in policy, configuration, and dynamic state level. NAE can precisely indicate problems in the network, identify which application or part of network is impacted, identify the root cause of the problem, and suggest how to fix it. Its continuous verification approach transforms day-2 operations from reactive to proactive mode and it does so without using any packet data. NAE helps avoid outages by predicting the impact of changes, reducing network-related IT incidents and shrinking the mean time to repair by up to 66 percent. NAE also helps assure network security and segmentation compliance. To learn more about NAE, visit: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/data-center-analytics/network-assurance-engine/index.html

Cisco Nexus 9300-GX Series switch specifications