Cisco Nexus N9K-C93180YC-FX3S Switch

Product overview

Based on Cisco Cloud Scale technology, the Cisco N9300-FX3S is the latest generation of access switches. Building on the successful N9300-FX series, the platform supports cost-effective cloud-scale deployments and an increased number of endpoints, and is capable of wire-rate security and telemetry. The platform is built on modern system architecture designed to provide high performance and meet the evolving needs of highly scalable data centers and growing enterprises.

Cisco provides the Cisco NX-OS mode of operation for the Cisco N9300-FX3S Series Switch. 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.

Switch model

Table 1.        Cisco N9300-FX3S Series Switch

The Cisco N93180YC-FX3S Switch (Figure 1) is a 1RU switch that supports 3.6 Tbps of bandwidth and 1.2 bpps. The 48 downlink ports on the N93180YC-FX3S are capable of supporting 1-, 10-, or 25-Gbps Ethernet, offering deployment flexibility and investment protection. The 6 uplink ports can be configured as 40 and 100-Gbps Ethernet, offering flexible migration options. Please see the Licensing guide section below to enable features on the platform. The Cisco N93180YC-FX3S switch supports standard PTP Telecom profiles with Synchronous Ethernet (SyncE) and PTP boundary clock functionality for telco data center edge environments.

Cisco N93180YC-FX3S Switch

Features and benefits

The Cisco N9300-FX3S Series Switch provide the following features and benefits:

●     PTP Telecom profile

◦    Precision Time Protocol (PTP) is a protocol for distributing precise times and frequencies over packet networks. PTP is defined in the IEEE Standard 1588 and defines an exchange of timed messages. The G.8275.1 profile is also used in telecom networks where phase or time-of-day synchronization is required and where each network device participates in the PTP protocol.

◦    Support for PTP Telecom profile 8275.1 with SyncE

◦    PTP boundary clock

◦    PTP Profile G.8273.2 - Class B

●     Cisco NX-OS architecture

◦    Support for standards-based VXLAN EVPN fabrics, inclusive of hierarchical multisite support (refer to VXLAN Network with MP-BGP EVPN Control Plane for more information)

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

◦    Segment routing 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/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).

◦    The switch also supports a software “FEX mode.” ^[1] The switch can be converted to a Fabric Extender (FEX) by the use of a command.

●     Extensive programmability

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

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

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

●     High scalability, flexibility, and security

◦    Flexible forwarding tables support up to two million shared entries on the FX3S model. Flexible use of TCAM space allows for custom definition of access control list (ACL) templates.

◦    IEEE 802.1ae MAC Security (MACsec) ^[2] and CloudSec ^[2] (VTEP-to-VTEP encryption) support on all ports of 9300-FX3S model with speeds greater than or equal to 1 Gbps, allows traffic encryption at the physical layer and provides secure server, border leaf, and leaf-to-spine connectivity.

●     Intelligent buffer management

◦    The platform offers Cisco’s innovative intelligent buffer management, which offers 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 are:

◦    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 queues and avoid reordering, which allows elephant flows to take full-link bandwidth.

●     RDMA over Converged Ethernet – RoCE support

◦    Platform offers lossless transport for RDMA over Converged Ethernet with support of DCB protocols:

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

◦    Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) to reserve bandwidth per priority class in a network-contention situation

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

◦    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 can track ECN statistics regarding the number of marked packets that have experienced congestion.

●     Hardware and software high availability

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

◦    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 that include hot and cold patching

◦    Switch uses hot-swappable Power-Supply Units (PSUs) and fans with N+1 redundancy.

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

◦    Single binary image that supports every switch in the Cisco N9000 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.

◦    Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) is the network management platform for all 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 0 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 a templated deployment model and configuration compliance alerting with automatic remediation. 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 Data Center Network Assurance and Insights

◦    Support to intelligent automation to day-2 operations with Cisco Data Center Network Assurance and Insights. Click here to learn more.

Product specifications

The Cisco N9300-FX3S Series Switch offers industry-leading density and performance with flexible port configurations that can support existing copper and fiber cabling (Table 2).

Table 2.        Cisco N9300-FX3S Series Switch specifications

Table 3 lists the performance and scalability specifications for The Cisco N9300-FX3S Series Switch. (Check the software release notes for feature support information.)

Table 3.        Hardware performance and scalability specifications^*

Table 4 lists the environmental properties, and Table 5 lists the weight for The Cisco N9300-FX3S Series Switch.

Table 4.        Environmental properties

Table 5.        Weight

Table 6 summarizes regulatory standards compliance for the Cisco N9300-FX3S Series Switch.

Table 6.        Regulatory standards compliance: Safety and EMC

Software licensing and optics supported

The software packaging for Cisco N9000 Series Switches offers flexibility and a comprehensive feature set. The default system software has a comprehensive Layer 2 security and management feature set. To enable additional functions, including Layer 3 IP unicast and IP multicast routing and Cisco Nexus Data Broker, you must install additional licenses. To meet customer requirements, licensing is available as both subscription and perpetual. The licensing guide illustrates the software packaging and licensing available to enable advanced features. For the latest software release information and recommendations, refer to the product bulletin at https://www.cisco.com/go/nexus9000.

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

Ordering information

Table 7 presents ordering information for the Cisco N9300-FX3S Series Switch.

Table 7.        Ordering information

For more information

For more information about the Cisco N9000 Series and latest software release information and recommendations, visit https://www.cisco.com/go/nexus9000.

^[1] For the capabilities to enable FEX mode, please see the latest software release notes for details.

^[2] For the capabilities to enable MACsec needs feature license, please see the Cisco N9000 Licensing Guide and release notes for details.