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Cisco Nexus 6000 Series Switches

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At-A-Glance

Cisco Nexus 6000 Series Switches Portfolio

The Cisco Nexus® Family, Cisco’s flagship switching product line in the data center,

has been the benchmark for innovation in the networking industry. Complementing the

existing Cisco Nexus Family switches, the Cisco Nexus 6000 Series is an important

component of the Cisco® Unified Data Center architecture. The Cisco Nexus 6004

and 6001 Switches extend the industry-leading innovations and versatility of the Cisco

Nexus Family with high 40-Gbps, 10-Gbps, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)

port density; an energy-efficient small form factor; low latency; multilayer services;

and the choice of front-to-back or back-to-front cooling. With its scalability and

performance, the Cisco Nexus 6000 Series is designed for a broad range of traditional

data center and large-scale virtualized cloud deployments. The Cisco Nexus 6000

Series also uses the Cisco NX-OS Software operating system to offer the intelligent

flow management and operation flexibility required in data center deployments

(Figure 1).

Figure 1. Introducing the Cisco Nexus 6000 Series

• Connectivity at 10 or 40 Gbps

• Convergence with FCoE

• Versatile Design with Fabric

Extenders

• Cisco NX-OS

• Compact Footprint

• Fabric Extension Technology

• 40-Gbps Cisco Fabric

Extender Transceiver

• Low Power Use

• Sampled NetFlow

• Active Buer Monitoring

• Intelligent SPAN and ERSPAN

• Microburst Monitoring

• 7.68 Tbps (Cisco Nexus 6004)

• Industry-Leading 10- and 40-Gbps

Ports per Rack Unit

• Single Management Point for

More Than 1500 Servers

• First 40-Gbps FCoE Switch

Extensible

and Scalable

Intelligent Flow

Management

Operation

Flexibility

Reduced

TCO

The Cisco Nexus 6000 Series provides a platform for customers to build a robust

data center fabric that can scale significantly to accommodate data center growth in

future years.

Challenges

The Cisco Nexus 6000 Series architecture with new innovations delivers the

infrastructure needed to support cloud deployments and data centers optimized for

virtualization. High-performance servers deployed in the cloud can support many

more virtual machines and workloads than ever before. The requirement to deploy

new servers on demand puts additional strain on the network fabric. The Cisco Nexus

6000 Series addresses these challenges with scalability and performance that make

this platform well suited to meeting the current and future needs of the data center.

The Cisco Nexus 6000 Series with front-to-back or back-to-front cooling supports

efficient data center hot- and cold-aisle designs. The Cisco Nexus 6004 Switch helps

data centers operate within their space, power, and cooling parameters. The Cisco

Nexus 6004 addresses the needs of high-frequency trading (HFT) applications by

delivering port-to-port latency of about 1 microsecond using cut-through switching

technology.

Cisco Nexus 6001 and 6004 Switches

The Cisco Nexus 6004 Switch (Figure 2) is a four-rack-unit (4RU) 10 and 40 Gigabit

Ethernet and FCoE switch offering up to 7.68 terabits per second (Tbps) of throughput

switching performance and up to 96 x 40-Gbps ports per fully populated system. The

Cisco Nexus 6004 is also equipped with four expansion modules to accommodate

network growth. The expansion modules provide 12 ports of 40-Gbps Gigabit Ethernet

and FCoE ports using a Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable (QSFP) interface. With all

four expansion modules installed, the Cisco Nexus 6004 delivers 96 ports of QSFP

connectivity. The Cisco Nexus 6004 can also support up to 384 ports of Enhanced

SFP (SFP+) connectivity using breakout cables. Each port on the chassis can operate

in either 1 x 40 Gigabit Ethernet or 4 x 10 Gigabit Ethernet mode. The Cisco Nexus

6004 supports grid redundancy and 3+3 redundancy through the use of six power

supplies. When PortChannels are applied to FCoE Inter-switch links (ISLs), the Cisco

Nexus 6004 provides up to 640 Gbps of storage throughput, nearly six times the

throughput of traditional storage ISLs.

Summary of content (3 pages)

PAGE 1
At-A-Glance Cisco Nexus 6000 Series Switches Cisco Nexus 6000 Series Switches Portfolio The Cisco Nexus® Family, Cisco’s flagship switching product line in the data center, has been the benchmark for innovation in the networking industry. Complementing the existing Cisco Nexus Family switches, the Cisco Nexus 6000 Series is an important component of the Cisco® Unified Data Center architecture.
PAGE 2
At-A-Glance Figure 2. Cisco Nexus 6004 Chassis The Cisco Nexus 6004 in a 4RU form factor quadruples performance and density and massively boosts bandwidth with the introduction of true 40 Gigabit Ethernet. The Cisco Nexus 6001 delivers 1.5 times the density in a 1RU form factor with additional true 40 Gigabit Ethernet. Table 1 lists performance and scalability enhancements in the Cisco Nexus 6000 Series. Table 1.
PAGE 3
At-A-Glance The Cisco Nexus 6004 can be an aggregation point for Cisco Nexus 2200 platform fabric extenders, a connectivity point for 40 Gigabit Ethernet servers, and an aggregation or spine node for Cisco Nexus 5500 platform switches, Cisco Nexus 6001 Switches, and other Cisco Nexus 6004 Switches.