Cisco Nexus N9K-C9336PQ Switch

Product overview

Industry shifts are redefining IT at all levels. On-premise IT consumption models are shifting to cloud-based services. IT as a Service (IaaS) is supplanted by applications as a service. Separate development and operations are moving toward integrated Development and Operations (DevOps). Device-centric management models are migrating to application-centric management.

Business agility requires application agility, so IT teams need to provision applications in hours instead of months. Resources need to scale up (or down) in minutes, not hours. Traditional approaches take a siloed operational view, with no common operational model for the application, network, security, and cloud teams. A common operational model delivers application agility, simplified operations, assured performance, and scale.

The Solution: An application-centric approach to managing your infrastructure

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-based application profiles. The Cisco ACI fabric is designed from the foundation to support emerging industry demands while maintaining a migration path for architecture already in place. The fabric is designed to support the industry move to management automation, programmatic policy, and dynamic “workload-anywhere” models. The Cisco ACI fabric accomplishes this with a combination of hardware, policy-based control systems, and software closely coupled to provide advantages not possible in other models.

The fabric consists of three major components: the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), spine switches, and leaf switches. These three components handle both the application of network policy and the delivery of packets. Organizations can use the ACI-ready Cisco N9000 Series Switches as spine or leaf switches to take full advantage of an automated, policy-based, systems management approach. The Cisco N9300 Series Switches include both spine and leaf switches. For detailed information, please refer here.

Switch models

The Cisco N9336PQ ACI Spine Switch is a 2-Rack-Unit (2RU) spine switch for Cisco ACI that supports 2.88 Tbps of bandwidth and 2.3 billion packets per second (bpps) across 36 fixed 40 QSFP+ ports (Figure 1). Cisco N9300 platform leaf switches are Layer 2 and 3 nonblocking 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet switches with up to 2.56 Terabits per second (Tbps) of internal bandwidth.

Cisco N9336PQ Switch

The Cisco N9364C ACI Spine Switch is a 2-Rack-Unit (2RU) spine switch for Cisco ACI that supports 12.84 Tbps of bandwidth and 4.3 bpps across 64 fixed 40/100G QSFP28 ports and 2 fixed 1/10G SFP+ ports (Figure 2). Breakout is not supported on ports 1 to 64. The last 16 ports marked in green support wire-rate MACsec encryption ^[1].

Cisco N9364C Switch

The Cisco N9332C is the smallest form-factor 1-Rack-Unit (1RU) spine switch for Cisco ACI that supports 6.4 Tbps of bandwidth and 2.3 bpps across 32 fixed 40/100G QSFP28 ports and 2 fixed 1/10G SFP+ ports (Figure 3). Breakout is not supported on ports 1 to 32. The last 8 ports marked in green support wire-rate MACsec encryption ^[2].

Cisco N9332C Switch

Specifications

Table 1 lists the specifications for the Cisco N9336PQ switch. (Please check Cisco ACI software release notes for feature support information).

Table 1.        Cisco N9300 ACI Spine switch specifications

Cisco N9300 ACI Spine switch deployment scenarios

The N9300 ACI spine switch along with N9300 leaf nodes enable an automated and policy driven ACI architecture. The Cisco N9300 ACI spine switch offers advanced scalability in the smallest spine switch form factor, and enables connectivity to up-to 64 Cisco N9300 leaf switches with its high port density of 64 40/100 GbE ports and 12.84 Tbps throughput. The degree of redundancy in leaf-and-spine architectures delivers increased availability with a high level of flexibility in workload placement (Figure 3).

Cisco N9300 Platform in a Leaf-and-Spine Architecture

Software requirements

For the latest software release information and recommendations, please refer to the product bulletin at https://www.cisco.com/go/aci and Cisco Feature Navigator.

Regulatory standards compliance

Table 2 summarizes regulatory standards compliance for the Cisco N9300 Spine switch.

Table 2.        Regulatory standards compliance: Safety and EMC

Supported optics pluggable

For details on the optical modules available and the minimum software release required for each supported optical module, visit https://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/modules/ps5455/products_device_support_tables_list.html.

Ordering information

Table 3 presents ordering information for the Cisco N9300 ACI Spine Switch.

Table 3.        Ordering information

For more information

For more information on the Cisco N9000 Series and for latest software release information and recommendations, please visit https://www.cisco.com/go/N9000.