A data center switch is a device that connects computing devices in a data center so that they can communicate with each other. Switches are used to create redundancy and improve network performance.

A data center switch typically has multiple ports, which can be used to connect to various types of devices. The most common type of data center switch is the Ethernet switch, which is used to connect computers and other devices that use Ethernet cables.

How to Choose the Right Data Center Switch?

A data center switch is a multi-port network switch that is specifically designed for use in a data center. They are typically used to connect servers and storage devices to each other, as well as to connect the data center to the outside world.

There are many different types of data center switches available on the market today, so it can be difficult to choose the right one for your needs. Here are a few things to keep in mind when choosing a data center switch:

1. Make sure that the switch supports the required number of ports.

2. Choose a switch with redundant power supplies for added reliability.

3. Select a switch that offers features such as port monitoring and VLAN support.

4. Consider the overall cost of ownership when making your decision.

Cisco Nexus 93108TC-FX3P: An overview

The Cisco Nexus 93108TC-FX3P Switch is a multigigabit-capable fixed switch, which was built with Cisco Cloud Scale technology. It’s part of the Cisco Nexus 9300 platform. Cisco Multigigabit Ethernet technology supports bandwidth speeds from 100Mbps to 10 Gbps over traditional Category 5e/6 cabling.

Current cabling infrastructure can’t meet the bandwidth needs driven by 802,11ac Wave 2 and Wi-Fi 6. To solve this, engineers created a new method of transmitting data packets using optics, which eliminates the need for replacing the current infrastructure. The switch is built on a modern-system architecture designed to provide high performance, support cost-effective deployments, and meet the evolving needs of growing mid-size to large enterprise customers.

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.

The system is designed to manage dynamic workloads, so it can serve and balance traffic as needed. Additionally, it offers a network fabric that combines time-tested protocols and new innovations to create extremely flexible, scalable, and resilient architecture with low latency and 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 toolsets.

Take advantage of the Cisco Nexus 93108TC-FX3P’s optimized efficiency, simplified operation, and installation combined with its wide array of device versatility to protect your investments as your business becomes more data-centric and interconnected.The expansive feature set includes 40MB of intelligent buffering, support for voice VLANs, and a full-featured Layer 2 and Layer 3 Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC).

The Features of the Cisco Nexus 9372PX

The Cisco Nexus 9300-FX3 series switches provide the following features and benefits:

Architectural flexibility

• Industry-leading software-defined networking (SDN) solution Cisco ACI support
• Support for standards-based VXLAN EVPN fabrics, inclusive of hierarchical multisite support 
• Three-tier BGP architectures enabling horizontal, nonblocking IPv6 network fabrics at web-scale
• Segment routing allows the network to forward Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) packets and engineer traffic without Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) Traffic Engineering (TE). It provides a control-plane alternative for increased network scalability and virtualization.
• Comprehensive protocol support for Layer 3 (v4/v6) unicast and multicast routing protocol suites, including BGP, Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), Routing Information Protocol Version 2 (RIPv2), Protocol Independent Multicast Sparse Mode (PIM-SM), Source-Specific Multicast (SSM), and Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP).

Extensive programmability

• Day-0 automation through Power On Auto Provisioning, drastically reducing provisioning time
• Industry-leading integrations for leading DevOps configuration management applications, including Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SALT, Extensive Native YANG, and industry-standard OpenConfig model support through RESTCONF/NETCONF
• Pervasive APIs for all switch CLI functions (JSON-based RPC over HTTP/HTTPS)

High scalability, flexibility, and security

• Flexible forwarding tables support up to two million shared entries on FX3 models. Flexible use of TCAM space allows for the custom definition of Access Control List (ACL) templates.
• MAC Security (MACsec) and CloudSec (VTEP-to-VTEP encryption) support on all ports of Cisco Nexus 9300-FX3 models with speeds greater than or equal to 1 Gbps, which allows traffic encryption at the physical layer and provides secure server, border-leaf, and leaf-to-spine connectivity

Intelligent buffer management

The platform offers Cisco’s innovative intelligent buffer management, which offers the capability to distinguish mice and elephant flows and apply different queue management schemes to them based on their network forwarding requirements in the event of link congestion.

Intelligent buffer management functions are:

• Approximate Fair Dropping (AFD) with Elephant Trap (ETRAP). AFD uses ETRAP to distinguish long-lived elephant flows from short-lived mice flows. AFD exempts mice flows from the dropping algorithm so that mice flows will get their fair share of bandwidth without being starved by bandwidth-hungry elephant flows. Also, AFD tracks elephant flows and subjects them to the AFD algorithm in the egress queue to grant them their fair share of bandwidth.
• ETRAP measures the byte counts of incoming flows and compares this against the user-defined ETRAP threshold. After a flow crosses the threshold, it becomes an elephant flow.
• Dynamic Packet Prioritization (DPP), provides the capability of separating mice flows and elephant flows into two different queues so that buffer space can be allocated to them independently. Mice flow that is sensitive to congestion and latency can take priority in the queue and avoid reordering, allowing elephant flows to take full link bandwidth.

RDMA over Converged Ethernet – RoCE support

The platform offers lossless transport for RDMA over Converged Ethernet with support of DCB protocols:

• Priority-based Flow Control (PFC) — to prevent drops in the network and pause frame propagation per priority class
• Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) — to reserve bandwidth per priority class in a network contention situation
• Data Center Bridging Exchange Protocol (DCBX) — to discover and exchange priority and bandwidth information with endpoints
• The platform also supports Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), which provides end-to-end notification per IP flow by marking packets that experienced congestion, without dropping traffic. The platform is capable of tracking ECN statistics of the number of marked packets that have experienced congestion.

Hardware and software high availability

• Virtual Port-Channel (vPC) technology provides Layer 2 multipathing through the elimination of the Spanning Tree Protocol. It also enables fully utilized bisectional bandwidth and simplified Layer 2 logical topologies without the need to change the existing management and deployment model.
• The 64-way Equal-Cost MultiPath (ECMP) routing enables the use of Layer 3 fat-tree designs. This feature helps organizations prevent network bottlenecks, increase resiliency, and add capacity with little network disruption.
• Advanced reboot capabilities include hot and cold patching
• The switch uses hot-swappable Power-Supply Units (PSUs) and fans with N+1 redundancy.

Purpose-built Cisco NX-OS software operating system with comprehensive, proven innovations

A single binary image that supports every switch in the Cisco Nexus 9000 series, simplifying image management. The operating system is modular, with a dedicated process for each routing protocol: a design that isolates faults while increasing availability. In the event of a process failure, the process can be restarted without loss of state. The operating system supports hot and cold patching and online diagnostics.

Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) is the network management platform for all NX-OS-enabled deployments, spanning new fabric architectures, IP Fabric for Media, and storage networking deployments for the Cisco Nexus-powered data center. Accelerate provisioning from days to minutes, and simplify deployments from day 0 through day N. Reduce troubleshooting cycles with graphical operational visibility for topology, network fabric, and infrastructure. Eliminate configuration errors and automate ongoing change in a closed loop, with a templated deployment model and configuration compliance alerting with automatic remediation. Real-time health summary for fabric, devices, and topology. Correlated visibility for fabric (underlay, overlay, virtual, and physical endpoints), including computing visualization with VMware.

Network traffic monitoring with Cisco Nexus Data Broker builds simple, scalable, and cost-effective network test access points (TAPs) and Cisco Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) aggregation for network traffic monitoring and analysis.

Conclusion

The Cisco Nexus 9372PX is the perfect data center switch for those who need high performance and scalability. It offers a comprehensive feature set, including support for virtualization, making it an ideal choice for businesses of all sizes. Thanks to its easy-to-use interface, the 9372PX is also perfect for those who are new to data center networking. If you’re looking for a top-of-the-line data center switch, the Cisco Nexus 9372PX is the perfect option.

The Cisco Nexus 5548UP Switch is a powerful, high-performance switch designed for use in data center environments. The switch offers 48 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, with each port capable of supporting up to 40 Gbps of bandwidth. The switch also supports 32 ports of Fibre Channel, with each port capable of supporting up to 8 Gbps of bandwidth. In addition, the switch offers a variety of features that make it well-suited for use in data center environments, such as support for virtualization and network security.

The switch is designed for high-density 10GE deployments, providing up to 10 times the bandwidth of traditional 1GE switches. The switch also supports advanced features such as hardware-based Quality of Service (QoS), virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN), and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS).

Benefits of the Cisco Nexus 5548UP Switch

The Cisco Nexus 5548UP Switch is designed to provide a high-density, low-power consumption solution for data center environments. The switch offers 48 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 6 40 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a 1U form factor. The latest features of the Cisco Nexus 5548UP Switch include:

High density and high availability

The Cisco Nexus 5548P provides 48 1/10-Gbps ports in 1RU, and the upcoming Cisco Nexus 5596 Switch provides a density of 96 1/10-Gbps ports in 2RUs. The Cisco Nexus 5500 Series is designed with redundant and hot-swappable power and fan modules that can be accessed from the front panel, where status lights offer an at-a-glance view of switch operation. To support efficient data center hot- and cold-aisle designs, front-to-back cooling is used for consistency with server designs.

Nonblocking line-rate performance 

All the 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports on the Cisco Nexus 5500 platform can handle packet flows at wire speed. The absence of resource sharing helps ensure the best performance of each port regardless of the traffic patterns on other ports. The Cisco Nexus 5548P can have 48 Ethernet ports at 10 Gbps sending packets simultaneously without any effect on performance, offering true 960-Gbps bidirectional bandwidth. The upcoming Cisco Nexus 5596 can have 96 Ethernet ports at 10 Gbps, offering true 1.92-terabits per second (Tbps) bidirectional bandwidth.

Low latency

The cut-through switching technology used in the application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) of the Cisco Nexus 5500 Series enables the product to offer a low latency of 2 microseconds, which remains constant regardless of the size of the packet being switched. This latency was measured on fully configured interfaces, with access control lists (ACLs), quality of service (QoS), and all other data path features turned on. The low latency on the Cisco Nexus 5500 Series together with a dedicated buffer per port and the congestion management features described next make the Cisco Nexus 5500 platform an excellent choice for latency-sensitive environments.

Single-stage fabric

 The crossbar fabric on the Cisco Nexus 5500 Series is implemented as a single-stage fabric, thus eliminating any bottleneck within the switches. Single-stage fabric means that a single crossbar fabric scheduler has full visibility into the entire system and can therefore make optimal scheduling decisions without building congestion within the switch. With a single-stage fabric, the congestion becomes exclusively a function of your network design; the switch does not contribute to it.

Congestion management

Keeping latency low is not the only critical element for a high-performance network solution. Servers tend to generate traffic in bursts, and when too many bursts occur at the same time, a short period of congestion occurs. Depending on how the burst of congestion is smoothed out, the overall network performance can be affected. The Cisco Nexus 5500 platform offers a full portfolio of congestion management features to reduce congestion. These features, described next, address congestion at different stages and offer granular control over the performance of the network.

Virtual output queues

The Cisco Nexus 5500 platform implements virtual output queues (VOQs) on all ingress interfaces so that a congested egress port does not affect traffic directed to other egress ports. Every IEEE 802.1p class of service (CoS) uses a separate VOQ in the Cisco Nexus 5500 platform architecture, resulting in a total of 8 VOQs per egress on each ingress interface, or a total of 384 VOQs per ingress interface on the Cisco Nexus 5548P, and a total of 768 VOQs per ingress interface on the Cisco Nexus 5596. The extensive use of VOQs in the system helps ensure high throughput on a per-egress, per-CoS basis. Congestion on one egress port in one CoS does not affect traffic destined for other CoSs or other egress interfaces, thus avoiding head-of-line (HOL) blocking, which would otherwise cause congestion to spread.

Separate egress queues for unicast and multicast

Traditionally, switches support 8 egress queues per output port, each servicing one IEEE 802.1p CoS. The Cisco Nexus 5500 platform increases the number of egress queues by supporting 8 egress queues for unicast and 8 egress queues for multicast. This support allows the separation of unicast and multicast that are contending for system resources within the same CoS and provides more fairness between unicast and multicast. Through configuration, the user can control the amount of egress port bandwidth for each of the 16 egress queues.

Lossless Ethernet with priority flow control (PFC)

By default, Ethernet is designed to drop packets when a switching node cannot sustain the pace of the incoming traffic. Packet drops make Ethernet very flexible in managing random traffic patterns injected into the network, but they effectively make Ethernet unreliable and push the burden of flow control and congestion management up to a higher level in the network stack.

PFC offers point-to-point flow control of Ethernet traffic based on IEEE 802.1p CoS. With a flow-control mechanism in place, congestion does not result in drops, transforming Ethernet into a reliable medium. The CoS granularity then allows some CoSs to gain a no-drop, reliable, behavior while allowing other classes to retain traditional best-effort Ethernet behavior. The no-drop benefits are significant for any protocol that assumes reliability at the media level, such as FCoE.

However, there are also some potential drawbacks to using this particular switch. One issue that has been raised is that the switch does not support Layer 3 switching, which can limit its usefulness in certain environments. Additionally, some users have reported issues with the web interface on the switch, although these appear to be relatively minor. Overall, the Cisco Nexus 5548UP Switch is a powerful and versatile option for data center networks but should be evaluated carefully before being deployed.

How the Cisco Nexus 5548UP Switch Compares to Other Switches

The Cisco Nexus 5548UP switch is a powerful and versatile addition to any network. It offers a variety of features that make it an ideal choice for both small and large networks. Here’s a look at how the Cisco Nexus 5548UP switch compares to other switches on the market:

– The Cisco Nexus 5548UP switch offers 48 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, making it one of the most scalable switches on the market.

– The switch includes eight 10GE SFP+ ports and two 40GE QSFP+ ports, providing flexibility and high-speed connectivity.

– The switch supports a virtual Port Channel (vPC), allowing for increased redundancy and resiliency.

– The switch is compliant with the IEEE 802.3af Power over Ethernet standard, making it easy to deploy in PoE environments.

– The switch is backed by a comprehensive warranty and support package, ensuring peace of mind for years to come.

Conclusion

The latest feature of the Cisco Nexus 5548UP Switch is its support for the Unified Port Controller (UPC). This new feature allows the switch to provide greater flexibility and scalability for unified data center deployments. The UPC makes it possible to connect multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand ports in a single device, which simplifies administration and reduces costs. In addition, the UPC provides enhanced security features, including support for Access Control Lists (ACLs) and role-based access control (RBAC).