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Today when you purchase an ACI bundle, it will always be an APIC with Nexus 9300
and Nexus 9500 nodes. Over time that may go out to other Nexus products or other
vendors products. The 9300s are primarily the Leaf switches, but the 9336PQ can
only be a Spine.

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The Nexus 9000 has two modes of operation to fit disparate operational models. In
the NXOS mode of operations Nexus 9000 utilizes Cisco NXOS data center OS to
provide a platform for existing network models and emerging SDN models. Optionally
customers can perform a software upgrade to migrate Nexus 9000 hardware to the
ACI model of operations. Both models have independent road maps and feature sets
while relying on a common hardware platform to provide customer choice and value.
The Nexus 9000 switches are the first products from what Cisco is calling its
Application Centric Architecture. The Cisco Nexus 9000 series is a new series of
switching platforms for the data centre that provides three key benefits
1.  Provides a scalable 1/10/40/100G platform for scalable and evolvable switching
for the data centre in the data plane
2.  Provides a range of additional programmability features to bring the benefits of
flexibility and agility not available before for those customers requiring new levels
of network programmability. Based on a new Standalone Model of
programmability using a new NXOS enhancements.
3.  Will evolve to support centralized fabric programmability with control plane
abstraction for those wishing to move to move to a new model of centralized
operations with granular policy control, with decoupling of control and data planes;
based on an application centric and centralized programming model called
Application Centric Infrastructure that will use a further new network Operating
System – the Infrastructure (iNXOS).

The hardware will thus operate with either NXOS enhancements for Standalone

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This is the portfolio as of early 2015. The Leaves are 9300 series; the spine is either
the 9504, 9508 or 9336.

Note:
-  No modular leaf support
-  APIC sold as appliance, cluster of 3 required

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Nexus 9508:
•  PS: up to 8, but only 4 are required for a fully populated chassis (8 permits input-
source redundancy)
o  For combined power mode or power-supply redundancy mode, the power
supplies can be installed in any power supply slot in the chassis.
o  For input-source redundancy mode, the power supplies must be divided
into two equal sets and installed as follows:
o  Slots 33 through 36 (labeled as PS 1 to PS 4) must be connected to one
grid (Grid A) ◦Slots 37 through 40 (labeled as PS 5 to PS 8) must be
connected to another grid (Grid B)
•  Fabric: 3-6 modules
•  Disable fabric modules in APIC before removing
•  Sup: 1+1
•  Controller: 1+1
•  Fan tray: 2+1
o  If you cannot replace a fan tray within three minutes, we recommend that
you leave it in the chassis until you are ready to replace it.
o  If you remove more than one fan tray at a time during operations, the
switch allows up to two minutes of operations before shutting down unless
you replace extra missing fan trays within that time. If the switch senses an
overtemperature condition when multiple fan trays are removed, the
shutdown can occur in less than two minutes.

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Nexus 9336 and 9500 Spine Line Cards

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Nexus 9396 and 93128 Leaf Switches

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Note the options for airflow – both front>back and back>front are available. They are
NOT swappable; you order the correct part based on what you want. The power
supplies and fan modules will have a red annotation or a blue annotation. Example:
blue annotation indicates cold air in; they would be taking air

Nexus 9396: The switch requires that three fan trays always be installed in the
chassis to maintain the designed airflow. You can remove one fan tray temporarily to
replace it with another fan tray within two minutes to avoid a shutdown, but if the
replacement fan tray is not available, leave the original fan tray in the chassis.
Fans: 2+1
PS: 1+1

Nexus 93128: The switch has two fan trays for operations but you can remove one
fan tray so long as you replace it within 30 seconds.
Fans: 1+1
PS: 1+1

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•  Uplink Module (GEM) is replaceable on 9396 & 93128. It is built-in on 9332
& 9372.
•  M12PQ is GEM1
•  M6PQ is GEM2 (and is built-in on 9332 & 9372)
•  GEM2 has more TCAM space for policy
•  100Mbps IS supported on 93xxTX switches (per scheibe email to ask-aci-
pm 141119)
•  100Mbps DDTS:
http://wwwin-tools.cisco.com/onesearch/display?pos=1&pid=Let%20Search
%20Decide&websessionid=lZoUMLaRRZ4RY79JzKPOLhG&query=CSCur
29658&src=TOPIC&uid=cmartini&reporder=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwwwin-
metrics.cisco.com%2Fcgi-bin%2Fddtsdisp.cgi%3Fid%3DCSCur29658

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The minimum number of spines is two (for TAC support; you can have one in your
Lab and make it work).

Increased contract scale in 1.0(2j) – The maximum contract limit for fabric is now
1,000 contracts and 10,000 filters. The maximum limit for leaf switches is 4K TCAM
entries (specific to N9K-M12PQ) and 16K TCAM entries (specific to N9K-M6PQ).

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Bundles contain optics but NO CABLES.
When purchasing APIC’s be sure to order the correct VIC (SFP or 10GBT)
based on the leaves purchased.

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ACI Lab Bundle: $115,000 84,462.95
ACI Simulator: $ 18,471 (Copper), $18,004 (Fiber)

The virtual ACI simulator can run on your laptop as a virtual machine, and is initially
available only for our Cisco sales team and in future, will be extended to partner sales
teams as well. Download and run on a Cisco laptop with at least 16GB memory. You
can download the ACI simulator and related information on simulator installation at
the secure Cisco internal location here. For more information on the ACI simulator
and resources with information on driving demos please visit the ACI demo resources
page.

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ACI Host Routed IP Fabric – Decoupling end-point ID
•  Frames entering fabric can be a native Ethernet frame, dot1.q tagged frame, a
VxLAN encapsulated packet.
•  At egress the fabric can leave the same encap or encap as something else
(normalization)
•  Every Leaf can be a default gateway.

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By using Broadcom, we’re using the same ASICs as our competitors. Broadcom built
VxLAN in the ASIC. Most competitors’ implementation of the Broadcom chip hobbles
its performance.
Systems are comprised of three ASIC building blocks
•  Broadcom Trident2 Network Forwarding Engine
•  Cisco Application Leaf Engine (ALE)
•  Cisco Application Spine Engine (ASE)

Broadcom Trident2 NFE: 10G/40G switch ASIC built in 40nm processor technology.
Cisco ALE & ASE: 40G buffer and switch ASIC built in 28nm processor technology
Cisco ALE:
•  24x40G port wire-speed switch
•  765Mhz in 28nm
•  85Million Gates
•  530MBit SRAM
•  4Mbit TCAM

Cisco ALE Salient features:

•  Buffer – 40Mbytes of Buffer to handle 40G to 10G speed mismatch
•  Network Overlay – Support for VxLAN/NVGRE gateway, bridging, and routing at
wire-speed
o  Multi-path of Multicast

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Nexus 93128 (3RU) gem has the same number of ports (exact same gem), but only 8
ports are activated; oversubscribed chassis.

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Nexus 9396: The switch requires that three fan trays always be installed in the
chassis to maintain the designed airflow. You can remove one fan tray temporarily to
replace it with another fan tray within two minutes to avoid a shutdown, but if the
replacement fan tray is not available, leave the original fan tray in the chassis.
•  Fans: 2+1
•  PS: 1+1

Nexus 93128: The switch has two fan trays for operations but you can remove one
fan tray so long as you replace it within 30 seconds.
•  Fans: 1+1
•  PS: 1+1

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Spines can only be connected to the Leaf’s 40G GEM module.

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