Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches combine high levels of scalability with operational flexibility.
Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches provide the foundation for Cisco® Unified Fabric. They are a modular data center-class product line designed for highly scalable 1/10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet networks with a fabric architecture that scales beyond 17 terabits per second (Tbps). Designed to meet the requirements of the most mission-critical data centers, the switches deliver continuous system operation and virtualized, pervasive services. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series is based on the proven Cisco NX-OS Software operating system, with enhanced features to deliver real-time system upgrades with exceptional manageability and serviceability.

The first in the next generation of switch platforms, the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series (Figure 1) provides integrated resilience combined with features optimized specifically for the data center for availability, reliability, scalability, and ease of management.

Coupled with Cisco NX-OS, the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series delivers a comprehensive set of features with nonstop operation in four chassis form factors:

- 18-slot chassis with 18 front-accessible module slots and side-to-side airflow in a compact horizontal form factor with purpose-built integrated cable management.
- 10-slot chassis with 10 front-accessible vertical module slots and front-to-back airflow and an integrated cable management system.
- 9-slot with 9 front-accessible module slots and side-to-side airflow in a compact horizontal form factor with purpose-built integrated cable management.
- 4-slot chassis with all front-accessible module slots and side-to-back airflow in a small form factor with purpose-built integrated cable management.

All Cisco Nexus 7000 Series chassis use a passive mid-plane architecture, providing physical connectors and copper traces for interconnecting the fabric modules and the I/O modules for direct data transfer. All intermodule switching is performed via the crossbar fabric ASICs on the individual I/O modules and fabric modules. In the case of Cisco Nexus 7004 chassis, since there are no fabric modules, the mid-plane provides the connectors and traces to interconnect the fabric ASICs on the I/O modules directly.

A scalable, fully distributed fabric architecture composed of up to five fabric modules combined with the chassis midplane delivers up to 550 Gbps per slot for 8.8 Tbps, 9.9 Tbps, and 18.7 Tbps of forwarding capacity in the 9-slot, 10-slot, and 18-slot switches, respectively. The 4-slot chassis delivers up to 1.92 Tbps of forwarding capacity in combination with the built-in fabric system.

The midplane design on the 9-slot, 10-slot, and 18-slot chassis and the backplane design on the 4-slot chassis support flexible technology upgrades as your needs change, providing ongoing investment protection.

Cisco Nexus 7000 10-Slot Switch Chassis
- The Cisco Nexus 7000 10-Slot chassis with up to eight I/O module slots supports up to 384 x 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 48 x 40 Gigabit Ethernet ports, and 16 x 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports, meeting the demands of large data center deployments. It has two dedicated supervisor slots to provide full redundancy.
- Front-to-back airflow helps ensure that use of the Cisco Nexus 7000 10-Slot chassis addresses the requirement for hot-aisle and cold-aisle deployments without additional complexity.
- The system uses dual system and fabric fan trays for cooling. Each fan tray is redundant and composed of independent variable-speed fans that automatically adjust to the ambient temperature, helping reduce power consumption in well-managed facilities while helping enable optimum operation of the switch. The system design increases cooling efficiency and provides redundancy capabilities, allowing hot swapping without affecting the system; if either a single fan or a complete fan tray fails, the system continues to operate without a significant degradation in cooling capacity.
- The system supports an optional air filter to help ensure clean air flow through the system. The addition of the air filter satisfies Network Equipment Building Standards (NEBS) requirements.
- I/O modules and supervisor modules are accessible from the front, and fabric modules, power supplies, and fan trays are accessible from the back.