Top Five Reasons to Choose Cisco Nexus 9000

Series Switches for Today’s Hybrid Data Center

© 2017 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Contents Overview
Overview.............................................................2
Digital transformation is having a dramatic effect on enterprises,
1.  Cloud-Scale Technology..................................... 3 particularly in three areas: application evolution, application
2. Open and Extensible Programmability................. 5 location, and infrastructure management. Modern data centers
now must accommodate highly distributed workloads intensifying
3.  Full-Stack Automation and Security.................... 6
communications across hundreds or thousands of servers
4.  Real-Time Analytics and Deep Telemetry............ 7 and even different clouds. Application development is also
experiencing major shifts, with DevOps and with the associated
5.  Advanced Centralized Management.................... 8
growth in the use of Linux containers, microservices, and IP
Conclusion..........................................................9 storage. With these trends, network latency, throughput, scale,
and visibility are extremely important in helping ensure high
For More Information..........................................9 application performance and effective IT operations.

Cisco Nexus® 9000 Series Switches offer an exceptional portfolio of

networking solutions and integrated, converged, and hyperconverged
platforms to help customer meet these challenges. The capabilities of
the next-generation Cisco Nexus 9000 Series with Cisco® Cloud Scale
technology provide a multiyear advantage and sustained differentiation
between Cisco and point-product network providers and providers of
proprietary, single-vendor public clouds. A key component of Cisco ASAP
Data Center (Analyze, Simplify, Automate, and Protect), the Cisco Nexus 9000
Series delivers a foundation that analyzes, simplifies, automates, and protects
your entire modern data center like no other solution available.

Here are the top five reasons that the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series is the right
choice as the foundation for today’s hybrid enterprise data centers.

2  © 2017 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

 1.  Cloud-Scale Technology

As challenges become more diverse, Cisco offers customers a

choice of custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)
and merchant silicon options in both modular and fixed form
factors with flexible 1, 10, 25, 40, 50, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet
port configurations. This flexibility offers investment protection
and helps customers optimize their price-to-performance
targets in their networking solutions for specific use cases
and environments.

However, to address rapidly changing and increasingly complex

hybrid data centers, customers should choose the Cisco Cloud
Scale ASIC that powers the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series. This
ASIC gives customers at least a two-year advantage in the
functions they get compared to off-the-shelf silicon products,
providing greater scalability, deeper analytics and visibility, and
greater performance.

3  © 2017 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Cloud Scale ASICs offer significantly greater scale and more features • Simplified control plane:
at an optimized price with capabilities that include segment routing, The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN)
control plane is used for VXLAN.
group-based security policy, network service headers, and full-
• Simplified VXLAN operations:
featured Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) overlays.
The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series supports VXLAN operations, administration and
• Smart buffers: management (OAM) for ease of troubleshooting and diagnostics.
Cisco Cloud Scale smart buffers offer innovations to manage buffers and • In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU):
queue scheduling intelligently by identifying large and small flows and handling The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series provides a lightweight model for faster upgrades,
them differently. thus reducing control-plane downtime to less than 3 seconds and eliminating
-- Dynamic Packet Prioritization (DPP): DPP prioritizes small flows over large data-plane downtime.
flows, helping ensure that small flows are not affected excessive queuing to • Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE):
accommodate large flows. FCoE reduces operating expenses (OpEx) and capital expenditures (CapEx) by
-- Approximate Fair Drop (AFD): AFD introduces flow-size awareness and converging the LAN and SAN environments.
fairness to the early-drop congestion-avoidance mechanism.
Cisco thus offers optimal cloud services and cloud economics through
Read Report
its Cloud Scale technology.
• Segment-based routing:
The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series brings the power of label switching to data
center routing.

4  © 2017 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

 2. Open and Extensible Programmability

Open Cisco NX-OS Software is the industry’s most extensible,

open, and programmable network operating system. It enables
customers to programmatically provision and configure Cisco
Nexus 9000 Series Switches through well-documented,
comprehensive APIs offered by both Cisco and third parties.
Customers can provision their switches using familiar tool
integrations (such as Puppet, Chef, and Ansible) and have
access to a robust API and community support.

This innovation is essential for application developers, DevOps

professionals, and other users who prefer self-service
infrastructure models to complete their projects, such as
application onboarding, more quickly and efficiently. Using
NX-OS, IT staff can meet these requirements by provisioning
the network more quickly, reducing the time to recovery after a
failure, and gaining flexibility in an environment that is familiar to
server administrators.

5  © 2017 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

 3.  Full-Stack Automation and Security

IT organizations are expected to operate at the speed of business and

deliver services with the agility of the public cloud. In this environment,
capabilities such as rapid configuration on a consistent basis are not just
desirable—they’re essential. But speed needs to be coupled with accuracy.
Many security problems are the result of user errors or misconfigurations,
and they put your company at risk.

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™) is the industry’s

number one Software Defined Networking (SDN) solution, delivering the
most comprehensive automation capability. It enhances business agility,
reduces total cost of ownership (TCO), automates IT tasks, and accelerates
application deployment.

• Customers can accelerate their • Cisco ACI enables tighter security and
application deployment cycles from more comprehensive analytics using
weeks to minutes using centralized, whitelist modeling, policy enforcement,
policy-defined automation management. and microsegmentation. Customers
benefit from a centralized application-
• Customers gain the benefits of a
level integrated visibility and real-time
seamless networking infrastructure
application health monitoring across
running both modern and traditional
physical and virtual environments.
applications that may be distributed
across multiple public and private clouds Cisco ACI supports a strong and growing
as well on-premises data centers. ecosystem of more than 65 partners and
supports integration using open APIs.

6  © 2017 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 6  © 2017 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
 4.  Real-Time Analytics and Deep Telemetry

The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series with the Cloud

Scale ASIC come configured with support
for the Cisco Tetration Analytics™ and Cisco
Nexus Data Broker solutions, providing
customers with real-time visibility into
application performance as well as enhanced
security. IT can better understand the current
system, helping prepare IT for whatever the
future may bring.

• Cisco Tetration Analytics:

Leveraging unsupervised machine learning and
behavioral analytics, Tetration delivers consistent,
automated policy enforcement, enabling application
segmentation across virtualized and bare-metal
servers on-premise, private and public clouds.
Through a single pane of glass, policy is automated
and enforced based on context and roles. Using
-- Forensic search and compliance
software and hardware sensors, Tetration provides
a deep understanding of application dependencies -- Automated whitelist policy creation
and interactions, increasing reliability and simplifying
• Cisco Nexus Data Broker is a simple, scalable, cost-effective solution for monitoring high-volume and
zero-trust operations.
business-critical traffic even in constantly changing data center and cloud environments. It supports port
-- Granular segmentation based on billions of flows, capacities from 1 to 100 Gbps within network test access point (TAP) and Cisco Switched Port Analyzer
process, and workload characteristics (SPAN) infrastructure. Additionally, it provides line-rate traffic filtering, replication, and forwarding functions,
-- Consistent policy enforcement within the enabling proactive, inline tools to create a strong, layered security environment even before threats enter or
workload – any workload, anywhere exit the data center.

7  © 2017 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

 5.  Advanced Centralized Management

The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series offers tools such as Cisco Data
Center Network Manager (DCNM) that enable customers to
deploy switches efficiently and optimize the fabric through
automatable capabilities. It automatically provisions Cisco
Nexus switches and configures switch fabric virtual machine
management (VMM) tools for the network manager. It also unifies
LAN and SAN management software into a single platform,
allowing both storage and network teams to manage their
respective domains through a single system while being aware
of the each other’s activities. The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series also
uses the Cisco Nexus Fabric Manager to simplify the process of
building and managing a Cisco Nexus fabric with a point-and-
click web interface. After Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches are
cabled in a leaf-and-spine topology, the fabric manager builds
and self-manages a VXLAN-based fabric, dynamically configuring
switches based on their roles and user-based actions.

8  © 2017 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 8  © 2017 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Conclusion
The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series is a foundational component of the
Cisco ASAP Data Center and is well-suited for both traditional
and fully automated software-defined data center deployments.
The Cisco Nexus 9000 Series provides multiyear, sustained
differentiation between Cisco and point-product network providers
and providers of proprietary, single-vendor public clouds,
supporting greater performance and enhanced operations through
features including intelligent services, programmability, automation,
analytics, and manageability. These advantages help Cisco
customers simplify their IT infrastructure and optimize it for the
many diverse on-premises and cloud-native applications they are
deploying today.

For More Information

• Cisco Nexus 9000
• Cisco Tetration Analytics
• Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure
• Cisco NX-OS
• Cisco Nexus Data Broker
• Cisco Data Center Network Manager

© 2017 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks.
Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)
C07-738877-01 06/17