Cisco Nexus 7000 M3-Series 24-Port 40 Gigabit Ethernet Module Data Sheet

The Cisco Nexus^® 7000 M3-Series 24-Port 40 Gigabit Ethernet Module is a versatile I/O module with a comprehensive feature set that offers wire-rate performance on each port. The module provides deep buffers and high-capacity ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM), making this module an excellent choice for building high-density, low-latency, scalable data centers.

Product Overview

Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches are the foundation of Cisco^® Unified Fabric solutions. Designed to meet the requirements of mission-critical data centers, these switches deliver exceptional availability, outstanding scalability, and the proven and comprehensive Cisco NX-OS Software data center switching feature set.

The first in the next generation of data center switching platforms, the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series provides integrated resilience combined with features optimized specifically for availability, reliability, scalability, and ease of management. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series fabric architecture scales beyond 17 terabits per second (Tbps) and is designed to support high-density 10, 40, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet deployments. Table 1 summarizes the 40 Gigabit Ethernet port density of switches in this platform.

Table 1.       Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches 40 Gigabit Ethernet Port Density

The Cisco Nexus 7000 M3-Series 24-Port 40 Gigabit Ethernet Module (Figure 1) is a high-performance, high-density 40 Gigabit Ethernet module designed for the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series. It delivers up to 384 40 Gigabit Ethernet ports (2:1 oversubscribed) in a single Cisco Nexus 7000 18-Slot Switch chassis. The module delivers 720 million packets per second (mpps) of distributed Layer 2 and 3 forwarding and up to 550 Gbps of data throughput. A Cisco Nexus 7000 18-Slot Switch fully populated with sixteen 24-port 40 Gigabit Ethernet M3-Series modules can deliver up to 11.5 bpps and 15.4 Tbps of switching performance.

Features and Benefits

The Cisco Nexus 7000 M3-Series modules are powered by the proven and widely deployed NX-OS operating system. The modules integrate a broad set of data center switching technologies, including both industry standards and Cisco’s own innovations such as these:

●   General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) Tunneling Protocol (GTP) hashing: This feature uses the advanced packet parsing capabilities of the M3-Series modules to provide enhanced port-channel and equal-cost multipath (ECMP) load balancing for GTP packets.

●   Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN): VXLAN enables organizations to build highly scalable virtual overlay networks for virtualized environments. It also provides the architectural flexibility and agility required to scale cloud deployments with repeatable pods in different Layer 2 domains and to migrate virtual machines between servers across Layer 3 networks.

●   Advanced data center interconnect (DCI) protocols: Advanced protocols such as Cisco Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV), Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP), Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), and Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) offer customers a broad choice of technologies to transparently interconnect their data centers and to extend applications across geographically dispersed data center sites.

●   Virtual device context (VDC): This feature enables the virtualization of a single physical device as multiple logical devices. Each provisioned logical device is configured and managed as if it were a separate physical device.

●   Exceptional integrated hardware security capabilities:

◦     MAC Security (MACsec) at wire rate with 128- and 256-bit encryption on all ports, supporting both key agreement protocols (Security Association Protocol [SAP] and MACsec Key Agreement [MKA]) in hardware

◦     Cisco TrustSec^® technology and access control list (ACL) processing for security-group tags (SGTs) on all ports

◦     Control-Plane Policing (CoPP), which protects the supervisor CPU from excessive traffic

◦     ACL counters and logging capability to provide deeper packet visibility

◦     Layer 2–to–Layer 4 ACL for both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic

●   Onboard fabric services accelerator (FSA): The accelerator provides higher performance and greater scalability for distributed fabric services such as Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) and Cisco NetFlow.

●   Cisco FabricPath: This technology enables organizations to build resilient, flexible, and massively scalable Layer 2 networks. FabricPath provides investment protection by allowing existing spanning-tree-based deployments to be connected to a FabricPath network.

●   Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders: The Cisco Nexus 7000 M3-Series modules can be used with the Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders. These fabric extenders are designed to simplify data center architecture and operations by dramatically reducing the number of points of management.

This broad set of foundational and advanced features available on the Cisco Nexus 7000 M3-Series 24-Port 40 Gigabit Ethernet Module provides flexible deployment options and investment protection for organizations that are consolidating their data centers and migrating to high-density 40 Gigabit Ethernet networks.

256-Bit AES Encryption

The Cisco Nexus 7000 M3-Series 24-Port 40 Gigabit Ethernet Module supports 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) MACsec encryption on all ports at all speeds. This encryption can be used to secure:

●   Data center uplinks to campus or MPLS cores

●   DCI links when using OTV, virtual port channel (vPC), direct links, etc.

●   vPC and FabricPath links within a data center

High-Performance Fabric Services Accelerator

The Cisco Nexus 7000 M3-Series 24-Port 40 Gigabit Ethernet Module has an onboard high-performance coprocessor: a fabric services accelerator. The FSA is directly connected to the M3-Series switch on a chip (SoC) with high-speed links. This approach enables the module to provide higher performance and greater scalability for distributed fabric services such as BFD and NetFlow.

Product Specifications

Table 2 summarizes the specifications for the Cisco Nexus 7000 M-Series 24-Port 40 Gigabit Ethernet Module.

Table 2.       Product Specifications

Table 3 summarizes distances and options for 40 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

Table 3.       40 Gigabit Ethernet Interface Distances and Options

Note:    Please refer to the Cisco 40GBASE QSFP Modules Data Sheet (https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/interfaces-modules/transceiver-modules/data_sheet_c78-660083.html) for further details about these QSFP Modules.

Note:    This data sheet describes the hardware capabilities of the Cisco Nexus 7000 M3-Series 24-Port 40 Gigabit Ethernet Module. Please refer to the Cisco NX-OS Software release notes (https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/switches/nexus-7000-series-switches/products-release-notes-list.html) or consult your Cisco representative to confirm the current or future NX-OS release required for any of these features.

Ordering Information

Table 4 provides ordering information for the Cisco Nexus 7000 M3-Series 24-Port 40 Gigabit Ethernet Module.

Table 4.       Ordering Information

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