Nexus Switches Overview

Cisco Nexus Family of products has become extremely popular in small and large data centers thanks to their ability of unifying storage, data and networking services.
Also the Cisco Fabric Interconnect can provide a rock-solid programmable platform that fully supports any virtualized environment.

The Cisco Nexus family includes a generous number of different Nexus models to meet the demands of any Data Center environment.

Nexus Family Switch

Cisco Nexus Family consists of following series types

1) CISCO NEXUS 9000 SERIES SWITCHES
The Data Center switches of Nexus 9000 can operate in Cisco NX-OS Software or Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) modes.
The main features of the new Cisco Nexus 9000 Series are: support of Fabric Extender Technology (FEX), virtual Port Channel (VPC) and Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN).

Nexus 9K Switches

2) CISCO NEXUS 7000 SERIES SWITCHES

The Data Center switches of 7K Nexus can provide an end-to-end data center architecture on a single platform, including data center core, aggregation, and access layer. The 7k series provides high-density 10, 40, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. The main features of the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series are support for FEX, Virtual Port Channel (VPC), VDC, MPLS and Fabricpath. In addition, the N7K supports fairly robust and established technologies for multi-DC interconnect (DCI).

Nexus 7K Switches

3) CISCO NEXUS 5000 SERIES SWITCHES
The Data Center switches of 5K provides access layer (End of Row), providing architectural support for virtualization and Unified Fabric environments. Cisco Nexus 5000 Series can support VXLAN and comprehensive Layer 2 and 3 features for scaling data center networking. It supports Native Fibre Channel, Ethernet, and FCoE interfaces. The default system software includes most Cisco Nexus 5000 Platform features, such as Layer 2 security and management features. Licensed features include: Layer 3 routing, IP multicast and enhanced Layer 2 (Cisco Fabric Path).

Nexus 5K Switches

4) CISCO NEXUS 3000 SERIES SWITCHES
The product family offers features such as latency of less than a microsecond, line-rate at Layer 2 & 3 unicast, multicast switching, and the support of 40 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. The Cisco Nexus 3000 Series switches are positioned for use in environments with ultra-low latency requirements such as financial High-Frequency Trading (HFT), High-Performance Computing (HPC) and automotive crash-test simulation Applications.

Nexus 3K Switches

The Cisco Nexus 3000 platform offers more than 15 models to satisfy all the switching needs an organization might have. The Nexus 3000 series offers switches starting with 1GE ports (Nexus 3000) and scales all the way up to 32 port 100GE ports with the Nexus 3232C model. Environments sensitive to delays will surely benefit from this series as they have been designed to practically eliminate any switching latency while at the same time offering large buffer spaces per port.