Cisco Nexus 9500 Series Switches
Build a highly secure, scalable, flexible next-generation automated data center

Overview:

Application architectures and deployment modes are rapidly evolving. Modern applications are multinode, highly modular, and deployed over a combination of bare-metal, virtual, and cloud data center environments. In addition to that, individual departments within an organization have varying infrastructure and networking needs. These factors require that data center networks be simple, programmable, extensible, scalable, and shareable to meet the demands of applications.

The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches operate in one of two modes – Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™) or Cisco NX-OS. In Cisco ACI mode, these switches provide a turnkey, fully automated, policy-based architecture to design and manage data center fabrics. In Cisco NX-OS mode, these switches provide the capability to use foundational layer 2/3 technologies, as well as modern technologies such as VXLAN, with a Border Gateway Protocol‒Ethernet VPN (BGP-EVPN) control plane, Segment routing, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), and automation via NX-APIs.

The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches include the Nexus 9500 Series modular switches and the Nexus 9200/9300 Series fixed switches.

The Cisco Nexus 9500 Series modular switches support a comprehensive selection of line cards and fabric modules that provide 1-, 10-, 25-, 40-, 50-, 100-, 200-, and 400-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. Using these line cards the Cisco Nexus 9500 Series switches can be configured with up to.

1. 256 400-Gigabit Ethernet ports (or)
2. 524 200-Gigabit Ethernet ports# (or)
3. 1024 100-Gigabit Ethernet ports (or)
4. 2048 50-Gigabit Ethernet ports (or)
5. 1024 40-Gigabit Ethernet ports (or)
6. 2304 25-Gigabit Ethernet ports (or)
7. 2304 1/10-Gigabit Ethernet ports

The supervisor, system controller, power supplies, and line cards are common across all three switches. Each switch, however, has unique fabric modules, and fan trays that plug in vertically in the rear of the chassis.

Features and Benefits:

Features	Benefits
High performance	The Cisco Nexus 9500 Series switch delivers nonblocking performance at a latency of 5 microseconds or less at 400-, 100-, 50-, 40-, 25-, 10-, and 1-Gigabit Ethernet speeds. This enables customers to build robust and scalable high-speed fabrics that can support several thousands of high-speed access ports.
Telemetry	The Cisco Nexus 9500 Series switches support extensive switch and flow telemetry capabilities that provide extensive real-time visibility into switch and fabric states.
High-density 1-, 10-, 25-, 40- and 50-Gigabit Ethernet access configuration	Organizations can transition from low-speed (100-Megabit Ethernet and 1-Gigabit Ethernet) server access designs to high-speed (1-, 10-, 25-, 40-, and 50-Gigabit Ethernet) server access designs with the same port density.
High-density 10-, 40-, 100- and 400-Gigabit Ethernet aggregation and spine configuration	The Cisco Nexus 9500 Series Switches help organizations transition from 1- and 10-Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure to 10-, 40-, 100-, and 400-Gigabit Ethernet infrastructures to support the increased bandwidth demands of scale-out, multinode application environments. The compatibility of 400-Gigabit Ethernet QSFP-DD modules, 100-Gigabit Ethernet QSFP28 modules, and 40-Gigabit Ethernet QSFP+ modules enables the migration and coexistence of 40-, 100- and 400-Gigabit Ethernet ports in the fabric.
High availability, reliability, and scalability	The Cisco Nexus 9500 Series Switches are designed with redundant supervisors, system controllers, power supplies, and fan trays, which eliminate any single point of failure in the chassis. These switches also support up to 6 fabric modules, which provide redundancy and graceful degradation of switching capacity in the event of fabric module failures. All transceivers are pluggable to support the highest possible Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) for the switch.
Designed for the future	The Cisco Nexus 9500 Series Switches are designed for future expansion with the capability to support higher speed ports and more bandwidth.
Power efficiency	The Cisco Nexus 9500 Series Switches are the first switch chassis designed without a midplane. The line cards and fabric modules connect directly. This revolutionary design provides optimal front-to-back airflow and helps the switch operate with less power. In addition, all Cisco Nexus 9500 Series switch power supplies are rated at or higher than 80PLUS Platinum for AC inputs and equivalent efficiency for DC inputs. The typical power consumption per 10-Gigabit Ethernet port is less than 3.5 watts (W). The typical power consumption per 40- and 100-Gigabit Ethernet port is less than 14W and 22W respectively.

Documentation:

Download the Cisco Nexus 9500 Series Switches Datasheet (PDF).