The Cisco Nexus 9800 Series modular switches expand the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series portfolio with a chassis that supports very high port density 400-Gigabit Ethernet line cards.
Data centers continue to evolve to support next-generation applications such as machine learning that drive massive bandwidth growth in intra data center traffic. To support this growth, data center operators require compact, high-capacity, high-speed, and highly efficient switches.
The Cisco Nexus 9800 Series chassis architecture can scale from 57 Tbps to 115 Tbps with a combination of various first-generation line cards and fabric modules. Each line card slot in the chassis can support line cards that offer 400GE or 100GE or 10/25/50GE ports.
The design of the Cisco Nexus 9800 Series chassis is a significant improvement on the previous-generation modular chassis design with better power distribution and connectors, fans, and a thermal design that allow the chassis to scale up to higher Ethernet speed line cards and fabric modules in the future. These design principles allow the doubling of total system capacity with next-generation line cards and fabric modules that support higher speed ports such as 800G at the same port density per slot as that of current-generation line cards.
The Cisco Nexus 9800 Series switch line cards and fabric modules are built with a power-efficient, high- performance, and high-capacity ASIC that supports dynamic flow let load balancing, fully shared on-die packet buffer, and line rate performance for small packets. The ASIC provides these capabilities without compromising on features and power efficiency and enables the Cisco Nexus 9800 Series Switches to be optimized for supporting high bandwidth applications across data centers of varying sizes and scale.
Furthermore, the chassis architecture supports control plane redundancy with dual supervisors, data plane redundancy with up to eight fabric modules, fan tray redundancy with four fan trays, and power supply redundancy with up to 12 high efficiency power supplies.
The Cisco Nexus 9800 Series delivers this high capacity with the efficiency and robustness of either Cisco Application Specific Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) or Cisco NX-OS operating systems. Moreover, the high capacity and port density of the Cisco Nexus 9800 Series enables data center fabrics to scale up while keeping the required number of spines lower. This results in lower overall infrastructure costs and higher overall power efficiency across the data center.
The fabric capacity in a Cisco Nexus 9800 Series chassis is delivered by up to eight fabric modules. Varying the number of fabric modules allows the chassis to provide fabric module redundancy and sufficient line rate capacity for line cards with different port speeds and port densities.
The Cisco Nexus 9800 8-slot chassis supports eight line card slots and three power supply trays.