Description

Product brief

The Cisco Nexus 93216TC-FX2 Switch （Figure 1 ） is a 2RU switch that supports 4.32 Tbps of bandwidth and over2.5 bpps. It features 96 10GBASE-T downlink ports, which can be configured to work as 100-Mbps, 1-Gbps, or 10-Gbps ports. Additionally, the 12 uplink ports can be configured as 40- and 100-Gbps ports, providing flexible migration options.

Features and benefits

Architectural Flexibility:

• • Industry-leading support for Cisco ACI™, a Software Defined Networking Solution.
  • VXLAN EVPN fabrics based on standards, including hierarchical multi-site support.
  • Three-tier BGP architectures for horizontal, non-blocking IPv6 network fabrics at web-scale.
  • Segment routing for MPLS packet forwarding and traffic engineering without RSVP-TE.
  • Comprehensive protocol support for Layer 3 unicast and multicast routing (BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, RIPv2, PIM-SM, SSM, MSDP).

Extensive Programmability:

• • Day zero automation with Power On Auto Provisioning.
  • Integrations with leading configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SALT).
  • Native YANG and industry-standard OpenConfig model support via RESTCONF/NETCONF.
  • Pervasive APIs for all switch CLI functions (JSON-based RPC over HTTP/HTTPs).

High Scalability, Flexibility, and Security:

• • Flexible forwarding tables on FX2 models support up to 1 million shared entries. Custom ACL templates are achievable through flexible TCAM space utilization.
  • IEEE 802.1ae MAC Security (MACsec) is supported on all ports of 9300-FX2 models with speeds greater than or equal to 1 Gbps. This enables traffic encryption at the physical layer, enhancing security for server, border leaf, and leaf-to-spine connectivity.

Intelligent Buffer Management:

• • The platform features Cisco’s innovative intelligent buffer management, which distinguishes between mice and elephant flows during link congestion.
  • Key functions include:
    • Approximate Fair Dropping (AFD) with Elephant Trap (ETRAP): AFD ensures fair bandwidth allocation for mice flows by exempting them from the dropping algorithm, preventing starvation by bandwidth-intensive elephant flows. ETRAP identifies elephant flows based on byte counts.
    • Dynamic Packet Prioritization (DPP): Separates mice and elephant flows into different queues, allowing independent buffer allocation. Mice flows, sensitive to congestion and latency, can take priority, while elephant flows utilize full link bandwidth.

RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) Support:

• • Lossless transport with DCB protocols:
    • Priority-based Flow Control (PFC) prevents drops and manages pause frames per priority class.
    • Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) reserves bandwidth based on priority in network contention.
    • Data Center Bridging Exchange Protocol (DCBX) exchanges priority and bandwidth info.
    • Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) marks congested packets without dropping traffic.

LAN and SAN Convergence:

• • Fibre Channel and FCoE N-Port Virtualization (NPV) for lossless, reliable Ethernet networks.

Hardware and software high availability:

• • Virtual Port-Channel (vPC) for Layer 2 multipathing.
  • 64-way Equal-Cost MultiPath (ECMP) routing for resiliency and capacity.
  • Hot-swappable PSUs and fans with N+1 redundancy.

Cisco NX-OS Software: Purpose-Built with Proven Innovations

• • Unified Binary Image: A single binary image supports all switches in the Cisco Nexus 9000 series, simplifying image management. The modular design dedicates a process to each routing protocol, isolating faults and enhancing availability. Processes can be restarted without state loss in case of failure. The system supports hot and cold patching and online diagnostics.
  • Data Center Network Manager (DCNM): This platform manages all NX-OS-enabled deployments, including new fabric architectures, IP Fabric for Media, and storage networking in Cisco Nexus-powered data centers. It accelerates provisioning from days to minutes and simplifies deployments from day zero onward. DCNM reduces troubleshooting cycles with graphical visibility into topology, network fabric, and infrastructure. It eliminates configuration errors and automates ongoing changes with templated deployment models and compliance alerting with automatic remediation. It provides real-time health summaries for fabric, devices, and topology, and correlated visibility for fabric (underlay, overlay, virtual and physical endpoints), including compute visualization with VMware.
  • Network Traffic Monitoring: Cisco Nexus Data Broker creates simple, scalable, and cost-effective network Test Access Points (TAPs) and Cisco Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) aggregation for network traffic monitoring and analysis.

Cisco Tetration Analytics Platform Support

• • Telemetry Data: Nexus 9300 Series switches export telemetry data every 100 milliseconds by default from the switch’s Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). This includes:
    • Flow Information: Details about endpoints, protocols, ports, flow start time, and duration.
    • Inter-Packet Variation: Captures variations within the flow, such as TTL, IP and TCP flags, payload length, etc.
    • Context Details: Derived outside the packet header, including buffer utilization, packet drops within a flow, and association with tunnel endpoints.
  • Cisco Tetration Analytics Platform: This platform consumes telemetry data and uses unsupervised machine learning and behavior analysis to provide pervasive, real-time visibility across your data center. It offers deep application insights and interactions, enabling simplified operations, a zero-trust model, and application migration to any programmable infrastructure. For more information, visit Cisco Tetration.

Cisco Network Assurance Engine (NAE)

• • Continuous Verification: Cisco NAE continuously ensures that the network infrastructure operates according to policy intent. It uses mathematical models to reason about policy, configuration, and dynamic state levels on behalf of the operator.
  • Problem Identification and Resolution: NAE can accurately pinpoint network issues, identify affected applications or network segments, determine the root cause, and suggest fixes.
  • Proactive Operations: By transforming Day 2 Operations from reactive to proactive, NAE helps prevent outages by predicting the impact of changes. It reduces network-related IT incidents and decreases the mean time to repair by up to 66%, all without using packet data.
  • Security and Compliance: NAE also ensures network security and segmentation compliance.

Product specifications

Table 1.  Cisco Nexus 93216TC-FX2 specification

Table 2. Hardware performance and scalability specification

Table 3. Weight 

Table 4.  Ordering information