The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switches are the foundation of the Cisco® Unified Switching Matrix solution. Designed to meet the requirements of mission-critical data centers, these switches offer superior availability, excellent scalability, and the mature and comprehensive Cisco NX-OS software data center switching feature set.

The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series is the first product in a next-generation data center switching platform that delivers integrated resiliency combined with features optimized for availability, reliability, scalability and ease of management. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switching Matrix architecture scales to more than 17 terabits per second (Tbps) and is designed to support high-density 10 Gb, 40 Gb, and 100 Gb Ethernet deployments

The Cisco Nexus 7000 M3 Series 24-port 40 Gb Ethernet module is a high-performance, high-density 40 Gb Ethernet module designed specifically for the Cisco Nexus 7000 series. It offers up to 384 40 Gb Ethernet ports (2:1 overbooked) in a single Cisco Nexus 7000 18-slot switch case. The module provides distributed Layer 2 and Layer 3 forwarding of 720 million packets per second (mpps) and data throughput of up to 550Gbps. The Cisco Nexus 7000 18-slot switch is fully loaded with 16 24-port 40 Gb Ethernet M3 series modules, providing switching performance up to 11.5 bpps and 15.4 Tbps.

Characteristics and advantages

The Cisco Nexus 7000 M3 series modules are powered by the proven and widely deployed NX-OS operating system. These modules integrate a wide range of data center switching technologies, including industry standards and Cisco’s own innovations, such as:

General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) Tunneling Protocol (GTP) hashing: This feature uses the advanced packet resolution capabilities of the M3 series modules to provide enhanced port channel and equivalent multipath (ECMP) load balancing for GTP packets.

Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) : VXLAN enables organizations to build highly scalable virtual overlay networks for virtualized environments. It also provides the architectural flexibility and agility needed to scale cloud deployments with repeatable Pods across different Layer 2 domains, as well as to migrate virtual machines between servers across Layer 3 networks.

Advanced Data Center Interconnect (DCI) protocol: Cisco covers advanced protocols such as Transport Virtualization (OTV), Locator /ID Separation Protocol (LISP), Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), and Virtual Private Area Network Services (VPLS) to provide customers with a wide range of technology options to transparently interconnect their data centers. And scale applications across geographically dispersed data center sites.

Virtual Device Context (VDC) : This feature allows you to virtualize a single physical device into multiple logical devices. Each preset logical device is configured and managed like a separate physical device.

● Excellent integrated hardware security features:

◦ Line Speed MAC Security (MACsec), 128-bit and 256-bit encryption on all ports, key protocols supported in hardware (Security Association Protocol [SAP] and MACsec Key Protocol [MKA])

◦ Cisco TrustSec® technology and access control List (ACL) processing on all ports for Security group marking (SGT)

◦ The Control Plane Policy (CoPP) protects the Supervisor CPU from excessive traffic

◦ACL counters and logging capabilities provide deeper packet visibility

◦ Layer 2 to Layer 4 ACLs for IPv4 and IPv6 traffic

On-board Exchange Matrix Service Accelerator (FSA) : This accelerator provides higher performance and scalability for distributed exchange matrix services such as Bidirectional forwarding Detection (BFD) and Cisco NetFlow.

Cisco FabricPath: This technology enables organizations to build resilient, flexible, and massively scalable Layer 2 networks. FabricPath provides investment protection by allowing existing spanning tree-based deployments to be connected to the FabricPath network.

Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Switch Matrix expander: The Cisco Nexus 7000 M3 series module can be used with the Cisco Nexus 2000 Series switch Matrix expander. These exchange matrix extenders are designed to simplify data center architecture and operations by significantly reducing the number of management points.

The Cisco Nexus 7000 M3 Series 24-port 40Gb Ethernet module provides this broad set of basic and advanced features, providing flexible deployment options and investment protection for organizations that are consolidating their data centers and migrating to high-density 40Gb Ethernet.

256 bit AES encryption

The Cisco Nexus 7000 M3 Series 24-port 40 Gb Ethernet module supports 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) MACsec encryption at any speed on all ports. This encryption can be used to protect:

● Data center uplink to campus or MPLS core

● DCI link when using OTV, Virtual Port Channel (vPC), direct link, etc.

● vPC and FabricPath links within the data center

High-performance Fabric Services Accelerator

The Cisco Nexus 7000 M3 Series 24-port 40 Gb Ethernet module features an onboard high-performance coprocessor: the Switch Matrix Service Accelerator. The FSA connects directly to the M3 Series on-chip switch (SoC) via a high-speed link. This approach enables modules to provide higher performance and scalability for distributed structured services such as BFD and NetFlow.