The fabric extender support unified ports, allowing flexible deployment and LAN and SAN convergence in a heterogeneous architecture. A common, scalable, and adaptive architecture across data center racks and points of delivery (PoDs)?supports a variety of server options, connectivity options, physical topologies, and evolving needs. A single point of management and policy enforcement using upstream Cisco Nexus switches eases the commissioning and decommissioning of server racks through zero-touch installation and automatic configuration of fabric extenders.
Today's data centers require massive scalability to manage the increasing number of servers and higher demand for bandwidth from each server. The Cisco Nexus 2300 platform meets this need with higher-density ports facing servers and the parent switch without any changes to the existing cable plant. The 100 Megabit, 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet server access, and the 40 Gigabit network access are scalable, with no reliance on Spanning Tree Protocol. The Cisco Nexus 2300 platform can also provide up to 2:1 oversubscription.
In today's data center, application teams require the network to be flexible and capable of handling the rapid growth of applications. The Cisco Nexus 2300 platform provides deep shared buffers (32 MB) to absorb bursts of traffic from storage devices and a wide variety of applications, such as multicast feeds, voice traffic, video traffic, and healthcare applications. These deep buffers also provide flexibility to expand your network as your needs change. The shared buffers are also very useful in situations in which one or more servers are consuming most of the bandwidth in highly oversubscribed environments.