Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Distributed Modular System
The Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders behave like remote I/O modules for a parent Cisco Nexus 5000, 6000, or 7000 Series Switch. The fabric extender is essentially an extension of the parent Cisco Nexus switch fabric, with the fabric extender and the parent Cisco Nexus switch together forming a distributed modular system.
The Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders forward all traffic to the parent switch over 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks. Passing all traffic to the parent switch allows traffic to be shaped according to homogeneous policies established on the parent switch with a single point of management across more than 2000 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports and more than 1500 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports.
The distributed modular system architecture includes the following benefits:
- Architectural flexibility
- Feature/policy consistency across 2000+ ports
- Cost effective solution at scale with simplified cabling
- Single point of management resulting in simplified operations
- Optimized utilization of bandwidth
- Investment protection with feature inheritance from the parent switch
Cisco Nexus 2248PQ Features
- The Cisco Nexus 2248PQ offers the following features:
- Forty-eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabric extender host interfaces in a compact one-rack-unit (1RU) form factor
- Four QSFP+ uplink network interfaces (16 x 10 Gigabit Ethernet)
- Connection to the Cisco Nexus 6000 Series and 5500 platform parent switches at first customer shipment
- Highly scalable distributed modular system with up to 1152 x 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports (24 fabric extenders per Cisco Nexus 6000 Series and 5500 platform switch)
- Operates as a remote I/O module, extending the switch fabric for Cisco Nexus 6000 Series and 5500 platform switches
- 160-Gbps fabric in each direction (320 Gbps full duplex)
- FCoE and IEEE Data Center Bridging (DCB) support
- 3:1 oversubscription rate
- Two additional 16-MB buffers
- Predictable low-latency cut-through switching
- In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU)
- Support for host PortChannel and virtual PortChannel (vPC), with up to eight PortChannel members per PortChannel and no restriction on the number of PortChannels
- Excellent for 10 Gigabit Ethernet server and pass-through blade server connectivity
- Choice of port-side exhaust (front-to-back) cooling or port-side intake (reversed-airflow) cooling, compatible with data center hot-aisle and cold-aisle designs:
- With standard port-side exhaust (front-to-back cooling), all switch ports are at the rear of the unit in close proximity to server ports, aligned with the hot aisle
- With port-side intake (reversed airflow), ports are aligned with the cold aisle
- Choice of AC or DC power supply (the default configuration includes redundant dual power supplies)
- New coloring scheme on power supplies and fan trays to denote power supply and fan side in cold aisle (blue) and power supply and fan side in hot aisle (red)
- Individual independent hot-swappable fan trays (N+1 redundancy)
- Capability to be mixed with different types of Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders for the same parent switch to support various types of connectivity
- Homogeneous policies across a large number of ports
- Zero-touch provisioning, including configuration and software upgrade operations
