Cisco Nexus 7000 F3 network switch module

The Cisco Nexus® 7000 F3-Series 6-Port 100 Gigabit Ethernet Module (referred to as the Cisco Nexus 7000 F3‑Series module in this document) offers outstanding feature flexibility and performance on each port. The module enables the deployment of high-density, low-latency, scalable data center architecture.

Powering Cisco’s Unified Fabric Architecture

The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches are the foundation of the Cisco® Unified Fabric solution. Designed to meet the requirements of mission-critical data centers, these switches deliver exceptional availability, outstanding scalability, and the proven and comprehensive Cisco NX-OS Software data center switching feature set.

The first in the next generation of data center switching platforms, the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series provides integrated resilience combined with features optimized specifically for availability, reliability, scalability, and ease of management. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches’ fabric architecture scales beyond 17 terabits per second (Tbps) and is designed to support high-density 10, 40, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet deployments. Up to 768 native 10‑Gbps ports, 192 40-Gbps ports, and 96 100-Gbps ports can be supported in a single Cisco Nexus 7000 Series chassis.

The Cisco Nexus 7000 F3-Series module is a low-latency, high-performance, high-density 100 Gigabit Ethernet module. It is operationally consistent with the Cisco Nexus 7700 F3-Series modules and shares a common system architecture and the same application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology. Up to 96 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports are supported in a single Cisco Nexus 7000 18-Slot Switch chassis.

The Cisco Nexus 7000 F3-Series module is based on the Cisco Nexus F3-Series switch-on-chip (SoC) ASIC. This type of design increases performance while lowering the power and cooling requirements of the module. The Cisco Nexus F3-Series SoC is an innovative Cisco ASIC powered by a flexible packet engine, which makes it excellent for building the network infrastructure for public and private cloud environments. The Cisco Nexus F3-Series engine can support all the foundational networking protocols needed to build Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks, and it also supports highly virtualized environments with virtual overlay networking, hardware support for Cisco Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) and Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP). Cisco Nexus 7000 F3-Series hardware enables customers to transparently interconnect their data centers with protocols such as Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS).

The module delivers 900 million packets per second (mpps) of distributed Layer 2 and Layer 3 forwarding and up to 600 Gbps of data throughput.