Cisco Nexus Switches

Cisco Nexus Switches for High Speed Servers and Storage

Cisco Nexus switches help build your datacenter and your network foundations with both today and tomorrow in mind. The Nexus switches have three main advantages that improve the reliability, speed, and flexibility of the switched network: Fabric Extenders, Virtual Port Channel, and Unified Fabric.

Fabric Extenders

Cisco Nexus 2000 - Click for Datasheet

The Nexus switches have a unique design where remote Fabric Extenders act as remote shelves of the redundant core switches. Each Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender is controlled through multiple 10G copper or fiber uplinks by one Nexus 5000 or 7000 switch, with all management and switching decisions done by the parent switch. Each Fabric Extender can also have a secondary parent, creating reliability though redundancy. A typical deployment would have dual Nexus 2000 FE’s at the top of the rack for servers to dual-home connect to, and would have multiple uplinks to the Middle of Row or End of Row Nexus 5000 or 7000’s. This design creates a high speed and reliable core switching system with straightforward patch cable layouts.

Virtual Port Channel

Cisco Nexus 5000 - Click for Datasheet

The Cisco Nexus 5000 and 7000 switches make use of the Virtual Port Channel protocol. It is a special communication between redundant Distribution layer switches that allows for two switches to negotiate Port Channels with any type of Access layer switches. For example, if the Distribution layer was composed of two Nexus 5000 series switches, and the Access layer used existing Cisco Catalyst switches, you could set up Port Channels on each of the access switches, uplink them to both Nexus 5000 switches, and have all uplinks active all the time! Even better, with a setup of dual Nexus 7000 switches at the distribution layer, Nexus 5000’s and 2000’s at the access layers, all of the 10G links will be active with no loops or blocking.

Unified Fabric

The Nexus Unified Fabric provides upgrades to the Ethernet network to enable high speed lossless transport of Fibre Channel information packets with low overhead through the use of the Fibre Channel over Ethernet protocol. This allows for the gradual elimination of the older and slower SAN. But no organization is going to go out and replace all their existing storage arrays with new ones that have FCoE interfaces on them. So the Nexus 5000 has a special feature that enables conversion from Fibre Channel to FCoE.

Nexus 7000 - Click for Datasheet

The universal ports on the Nexus 5000 allows for any port to have Ethernet or Fibre Channel interfaces. Internally the Nexus Operating System (NX-OS) can map VSAN’s to VLAN’s, and will encapsulate the Fibre Channel traffic into Ethernet frames. To enable lossless transmission of storage at Layer 2 with low overhead, the Nexus switches are set up with Quality of Service to prioritize the storage traffic over all other traffic. This combination of features on the Nexus switches provided for a true datacenter Unified Fabric.

Twinax Connections

With all the high speed connections in the datacenter, the Nexus switches have made available the use of Twinax copper cabling. These connections have all the speed of fiber, at a fraction of the price. They make the Top of Rack and End of Row connectivity affordable and convenient.

Nexus Switch Models

Nexus 7000

This is a large chassis switch that is used as either a core switch or a distribution switch. In addition to having a high density of 10G, 40G, and future 100G ports, it has some unique features for multisite data communications.

Virtual Device Contexts allow the creating of complete virtual switches within a single Nexus 7000 chassis. Many organization use this feature to create a core switch and a distribution switch in one box, connected by external twinax, which is the only way to connect different Virtual Device Contexts

Nexus 5000

This switch has the option of full Layer 3 routing, and can have all ports set up as Universal Ports, with the option of copper, fiber, or storage. It also contains an engine to integrate Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

Nexus 3000

Nexus 2000

Nexus 1000

Technical specifications are unique on every Cisco Nexus switch. The Nexus 7000 runs on Cisco NX-OS a platform that has been engineered specifically to handle all the demands of a modern data center.

The Cisco Nexus 5548P is a 1RU 10Gbps switch offering up to 960 Gbps throughput and up to 48 ports. It offers 32, 1/10 Gbps fixed SFP+ unified Ethernet/FCoE ports and one expansion slot. The expansion modules include:

16-port 10 Gbps SFP+ Ethernet/FCoE
8-port 10 Gbps SFP+ Ethernet/FCoE, plus 8-port 1/2/4/8Gbps Native FC

Cisco Nexus 2000 Top of Rack - Click for Datasheet

Adcap Network Systems is a Cisco Gold Certified Partner. Our diversely skilled, expert technical teamlooks forward to assisting you in selecting the Cisco Nexus switch that is just right for you. Contact us to discuss your options, explore the possibility of Adcap project management for your installation/upgrade or deployment. Our trained and certified technical consultants can even come to your site and provide on-site staff training. Options for financing your purchase do exist, simply ask about it when you contact us.

Call Adcap today to discuss your Cisco Nexus switches, at (877) 462-3227! Our engineers and trained customer service specialists are waiting to help you.