Switches & Bridges

Organizations everywhere recognize that changing application environments are creating new demands for the IT infrastructure that supports them. Application workloads are deployed across a mix of virtualized and nonvirtualized server and storage infrastructure, requiring a network infrastructure that provides consistent connectivity, security, and visibility across a range of bare-metal, virtualized, and cloud computing environments:

• Application instances are created dynamically. As a result, the provisioning, modification, and removal of application network connectivity needs to be dynamic as well.
• Business units demand accelerated application deployments. IT departments have to provide shared IT infrastructure to address time-to-market needs and to increase their return on investment (ROI).
• With organizations deploying a mix of custom, open source, and off-the-shelf commercial applications, IT departments must manage both security and quality of service (QoS) for environments that support multitenancy.
• Applications have been transitioning over time to a less monolithic, scale-out, multinode model. IT infrastructure that supports this model must scale with the speed of business and support both 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.

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Organizations everywhere recognize that changing application environments are creating new demands for the IT infrastructure that supports them. Application workloads are deployed across a mix of virtualized and nonvirtualized server and storage infrastructure, requiring a network infrastructure that provides consistent connectivity, security, and visibility across a range of bare-metal, virtualized, and cloud computing environments:

• Application instances are created dynamically. As a result, the provisioning, modification, and removal of application network connectivity needs to be dynamic as well.
• Business units demand accelerated application deployments. IT departments have to provide shared IT infrastructure to address time-to-market needs and to increase their return on investment (ROI).
• With organizations deploying a mix of custom, open source, and off-the-shelf commercial applications, IT departments must manage both security and quality of service (QoS) for environments that support multitenancy.
• Applications have been transitioning over time to a less monolithic, scale-out, multinode model. IT infrastructure that supports this model must scale with the speed of business and support both 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.

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Based on Cisco^® Cloud Scale technology, the Cisco Nexus^® 9300-GX switches are the next generation of fixed Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches. The platform introduces a fully 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. The platform provides investment protection for customers, delivering highly flexible layer 2 and layer 3 scalability, and performance to meet the changing needs of virtualized data centers and automated cloud environments. The 9300-GX also offers various lower port speed and desities including 10, 25, 50 & 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 Nexus switch environments (Cisco NX-OS mode).

The Cisco ACI solution is a holistic, intent-driven architecture with centralized automation and policy-based application profiles. It provides a robust, transport network for dynamic workloads and is built on a network fabric that combines time-tested protocols with new innovations to create a highly flexible, scalable, and resilient architecture of low-latency, high-bandwidth links. This fabric delivers a network that can support the most demanding and flexible data center environments.

Designed for the programmable network, the Cisco NX-OS operating system automates configuration and management for customers who want to take advantage of the DevOps operation model and tool sets.

The platform hardware also enables collection of comprehensive Cisco Tetration Analytics^™ telemetry information at line rate across all the ports without adding any latency to the packets or negatively affecting switch performance. In addition, the product is designed to support innovative technologies such as Streaming Statistics Export (SSX), enhancing the visibility into switch statistics right from the ASIC. Through this application, users can better understand network performance without any impact on the switch control plane or CPU.

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Based on the Cisco Cloud Scale technology the Cisco Nexus^® 9300-FX3 Series is the latest generation of access switches. Building on the successful Nexus 9300-FX series, the platform supports cost-effective cloud-scale deployments, an increased number of endpoints, and is capable of wire-rate security and telemetry. The platform is built on modern system architecture designed to provide high performance and meet the evolving needs of highly scalable data centers and growing enterprises.

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 ACI is a holistic, intent-driven architecture with centralized automation and policy-based application profiles. It provides a robust, transport network for dynamic workloads and is built on a network fabric that combines time-tested protocols with new innovations to create a highly flexible, scalable and resilient architecture of low-latency, high-bandwidth links. This fabric delivers a network that can support the most demanding and flexible data center environments.

Designed for the programmable network, the Cisco NX-OS operating system automates configuration and management for customers who want to take advantage of the DevOps operation model and tool sets.

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The Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™ solution in the data center is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-based application profiles. The Cisco ACI solution provides a robust transport network for today's dynamic workloads. Cisco ACI is built on a network fabric that combines time-tested protocols with new innovations to create a highly flexible, scalable, and resilient architecture of low-latency, high-bandwidth links. This fabric delivers a network that can support the most demanding and flexible data center environments.

The Cisco ACI fabric consists of three major components:

• Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC)
• Spine switches
• Leaf switches

Building on the success of first-generation Cisco Nexus® 9300 platform switches, the latest Cisco Nexus 9300-EX and 9300-FX platforms can collect comprehensive Cisco Tetration Analytics™ telemetry information at line rate across all ports without adding any latency to the packets or negatively affecting switch performance. This telemetry information is exported every 100 milliseconds (ms) by default directly from the switch's application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). This information consists of three types of data:

• Flow information: This information contains information about endpoints, protocols, ports, when the flow started, how long the flow was active, etc.
• Interpacket variation: This information captures any interpacket variations within the flow. Examples include variation in time to live (TTL), IP and TCP flags, payload length, etc.
• Context details: Context information is derived outside the packet header, including variation in buffer utilization, packet drops within a flow, association with tunnel endpoints, etc.

The Cisco Tetration Analytics platform consumes this telemetry data, and by using unsupervised machine learning and behavior analysis it can provide outstanding pervasive visibility across everything in your data center in real time. By using algorithmic approaches, the Cisco Tetration Analytics platform provides deep insights into applications and interactions, enabling dramatically simplified operations, a zero-trust model, and migration of applications to any programmable infrastructure.

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