Cisco Nexus 9300-GX2 Series Fixed Switches Cisco N9K-C9332D-GX2B

Product overview

The Cisco Nexus 9300-GX2 series addresses the need for high-performance, power-efficient, compact switches in the networking infrastructure. These switches are designed to support 50G, 100G, 200G, and 400G fabrics for next-generation leaf and spine designs and IP storage fabrics. The platform is built with backward-compatible 400G optical interface Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable–Double Density (QSFP-DD) to transparently migrate existing data center fabrics from 40-Gbps and 100-Gbps speeds to 400 Gbps; it also offers various lower port speeds and densities, including 10, 25, 50, and 200 Gbps, using breakouts. Cisco provides two modes of operation for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches. Organizations can deploy Cisco^® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI^®) or Cisco NX-OS mode.

Cisco Nexus 9300-GX2 series switches

The Cisco Nexus 9332D-GX2B is a compact form-factor 1-Rack-Unit (1RU) switch that supports 25.6 Tbps of bandwidth and 4.17 bpps across 32 fixed 400G QSFP-DD ports and two fixed 1/10G SFP+ ports (Figure 3). QSFP-DD ports also support native 200G (QSFP56), 100G (QSFP28) and 40G (QSFP+). Each port can also support 4x10G, 4x25G, 4x50G, 4x100G, and 2x200G breakouts. The last eight ports, marked in green, are capable of wire-rate MACsec encryption.

Features and benefits

The Cisco Nexus 9300-GX2 series switches provide the following features and benefits:

● Architectural flexibility

Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches support Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI), Cisco NX-OS VXLAN EVPN, Cisco IP Fabric for Media, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker, and IP routed or Ethernet switched Layer-2 fabrics using a comprehensive set of unicast and multicast IPv6/IPv4 and Ethernet protocols.

◦ Purpose-built Cisco NX-OS Software operating system with comprehensive, proven innovations. The operating system is modular, with a dedicated process for each routing protocol: a design that isolates faults while increasing availability.

◦ Industry-leading Cisco Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution with Cisco ACI support. Cisco ACI is a holistic, intent-driven architecture with centralized automation and policy-based application profiles.

◦ 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.

◦ Comprehensive protocol support for Layer-3 (v4 and 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).

◦ Segment routing (SR and SRv6) allows the network to forward multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) packets and to engineer traffic without Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) Traffic Engineering (TE). It provides a control-plane alternative for increased network scalability and virtualization. Cisco IP Fabric for Media helps you migrate from an SDI router to an IP-based infrastructure. In an IP-based infrastructure, a single cable has the capacity to carry multiple bidirectional traffic flows and can support different flow sizes without requiring changes to the physical infrastructure.

◦ Nexus Dashboard Data Broker provides customers with complete observability into their network and solution(s) that can help them to identify and mitigate security threats, realize and remediate performance bottlenecks, adhere to data compliance, and have insight into capacity planning operations.

● Extensive programmability

◦ Day-0 automation through Power-On Auto Provisioning (POAP), drastically reducing provisioning time.

◦ Industry-leading integrations for leading DevOps configuration management applications, such as Ansible. Extensive native YANG and industry-standard OpenConfig model support through RESTCONF/NETCONF/gNMI.

◦ REST API interacting with Data Management Engine (DME).

◦ Model-driven telemetry, which enhances network observability.

◦ Third-party application hosting using Cisco Application Framework (CAF).

● High scalability, flexibility, and security

◦ Flexible forwarding tables support up to two million shared entries on Cisco Nexus 9300-GX2 models.

◦ IEEE 802.1ae MAC security (MACsec)1 capability on selected ports of 9300-GX2 models allows traffic encryption at the physical layer and provides secure server, border leaf, and leaf-to-spine connectivity.

● AI/ML networking

Cisco Nexus 9300 GX2 Series Fixed Switches support innovative congestion management and flow control algorithms along with the right latency and telemetry to meet the design requirements of AI/ML fabrics.

◦ Priority Flow Control (PFC) is a key capability supported on Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches that prevents Ethernet frame drops by signaling, controlling, and managing Ethernet flows along the path by sending pause frames to appropriate senders.

◦ The 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 is capable of tracking ECN statistics, including the number of marked packets that have experienced congestion.

◦ The platform offers lossless transport for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) with the support of Data Center Bridging (DCB) protocols.

◦ Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) reserves bandwidth per priority class in network contention situations.

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

◦ Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED) is a congestion-avoidance technique that allows Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches to detect and react to congestion in the network by marking flows that could cause congestion.

◦ The platform offers Cisco’s innovative intelligent buffer management, which offers the 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.

◦ Approximate Fair Dropping (AFD) with Elephant Trap (ETRAP). By using ETRAP, AFD distinguishes long-lived elephant flows from short-lived mice flows. 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.

● Hardware and software high availability

◦ Virtual Port-Channel (vPC) technology provides Layer-2 multipathing through the elimination of Spanning Tree Protocol (STP).

◦ Can do fabric link in the VXLAN environment, eliminating the need for peer-to-peer vPC. The 128-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.

◦ Software Maintenance Upgrade (SMU) contains fixes for a specific defect. They provide a quick resolution of critical issues.

◦ In-Service Software Upgrades (ISSU)s allows upgrades of device software while the switch continues to forward traffic. ISSU reduces or eliminates the downtime typically caused by software upgrades.

◦ The switches use hot-swappable Power-Supply Units (PSUs) and fans with N+1 redundancy.

● Cisco Nexus Dashboard

◦ Cisco Nexus Dashboard is a platform that transforms data-center and cloud network operations through simplicity, automation, and analytics. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC), Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights (NDI), Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO), and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker (NDDB) are integrated as services into Cisco Nexus Dashboard.

◦ Cisco Nexus Dashboard is included with all Cisco Nexus 9000 switch tiered licenses. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller requires Cisco Data Center Networking (DCN) Essentials license, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator requires Cisco DCN Advantage, and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights requires Cisco DCN Premier or Cisco DCN Day-2 Ops add-on license.

Cisco Nexus 9300 ACI spine switch specifications