Products

Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches

Important Features

The Cisco Nexus 5600 platform offers broad connectivity support, low latency, and virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN) technology. These capabilities make the switches ideal for ToR and end-of-rack (EoR) access and Cisco Fabric Extender (FEX) aggregation in traditional, converged, virtualized, and cloud deployments.

Scale

The Cisco 5600 platform is designed to meet the scaling demands of virtualized and cloud deployments. These switches:

• Support up to 2304 ports in a single management domain with Cisco FEX architecture
• Support large buffers for congestion management
• Provide a hardware-based VXLAN (Layer 2, Layer 3, and gateway) and are capable of network virtualization generic routing encapsulation (NVGRE)
• Deliver integrated Layer 3 services with large table sizes and buffers with 1-microsecond latency

Operational Efficiency

The Cisco 5600 switches simplify operations in the following ways:

• The Cisco FEX architecture provides a single point of management.
• An advanced analytics toolkit makes it easy to monitor latency and buffering.
• Programmers can use Python, Tool Command Language (Tcl), the Cisco ONE Platform Kit (onePK), and OpenFlow.

Architectural Flexibility

The Cisco 5600 switches provide deployment flexibility for varying customer needs:

• Broad connectivity support includes Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, 40 Gigabit Ethernet, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet; native Fibre Channel; and Fibre Channel over Ethernet.
• Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA) is supported for simplified virtualized and cloud deployments.
• Provide a hardware-based VXLAN (Layer 2, Layer 3, and gateway) and are capable of network virtualization generic routing encapsulation (NVGRE)
• Cisco FabricPath is supported for scalable Layer 2 networks.