Cisco Nexus 7000 F3 network switch module

The Cisco Nexus® 7000 F3-Series 12-Port 40 Gigabit Ethernet Module (referred to as the Cisco Nexus 7000 F3-Series module in this document) offers outstanding feature flexibility and wire-rate performance on each port. The module enables the deployment of high-density, low-latency, scalable data center architecture.

Powering Cisco’s Unified Fabric Architecture

The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches are the foundation of the Cisco Unified Fabric solution. Designed to meet the requirements of mission-critical data centers, these switches deliver exceptional availability, outstanding scalability, and the proven and comprehensive Cisco NX-OS Software data center switching feature set.

The first in the next generation of data center switching platforms, the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series provides integrated resilience combined with features optimized specifically for availability, reliability, scalability, and ease of management. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches’ fabric architecture scales beyond 17 terabits per second (Tbps) and is designed to support high-density 10 Gigabit, 40 Gigabit Ethernet, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet deployments. Up to 768 native 10-Gbps ports, 192 40-Gbps ports, and 96 100-Gbps ports can be supported in a single Cisco Nexus 7000 Series chassis.

The Cisco Nexus 7000 F3-Series module is a low-latency, high-performance, high-density 40 Gigabit Ethernet module. It is operationally consistent with the Cisco Nexus 7700 F3-Series modules and shares a common system architecture and the same application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology. Up to 192 wire-rate 40 Gigabit Ethernet ports are supported in a single Cisco Nexus 7000 18-Slot Switch chassis.

The Cisco Nexus 7000 F3-Series module is based on the Cisco Nexus F3-Series switch-on-chip (SoC) ASIC. This type of design increases performance while lowering the power and cooling requirements of the module. The Cisco Nexus F3-Series SoC is an innovative Cisco-designed ASIC powered by a flexible packet engine, which makes it excellent for building the network infrastructure for public and private cloud environments. The Cisco Nexus F3-Series engine can support all the foundational networking protocols needed to build Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks, and it also supports highly virtualized environments with virtual overlay networking, hardware support for Cisco Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN), and Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) technology. Cisco Nexus 7000 F3-Series hardware enables customers to transparently interconnect their data centers with protocols such as Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS).

The module delivers 720 million packets per second (mpps) of distributed Layer 2 and Layer 3 forwarding and up to 480 Gbps of data throughput. A Cisco Nexus 7000 18-Slot Switch fully populated with the Cisco Nexus 7000 F3-Series module can deliver up to 11.5 bpps and 15.4 Tbps of switching performance.