Cisco Nexus 9336PQ Managed L2/L4 2U Gray

Industry shifts are redefining IT at all levels. On-premise IT consumption models are shifting to cloud-based services. IT as a Service (IaaS) is supplanted by applications as a service. Separate development and operations are moving toward integrated Development and Operations (DevOps). Device-centric management models are migrating to application-centric management.

Business agility requires application agility, so IT teams need to provision applications in hours instead of months. Resources need to scale up (or down) in minutes, not hours. Traditional approaches take a siloed operational view, with no common operational model for the application, network, security, and cloud teams. A common operational model delivers application agility, simplified operations, assured performance, and scale.

Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-based application profiles. The Cisco ACI fabric is designed from the foundation to support emerging industry demands while maintaining a migration path for architecture already in place. The fabric is designed to support the industry move to management automation, programmatic policy, and dynamic “workload-anywhere” models. The Cisco ACI fabric accomplishes this with a combination of hardware, policy-based control systems, and software closely coupled to provide advantages not possible in other models.

The Cisco Nexus 9336PQ ACI Spine Switch is a 2-Rack-Unit (2RU) spine switch for Cisco ACI that supports 2.88 Tbps of bandwidth and 2.3 billion packets per second (bpps) across 36 fixed 40 QSFP+ ports (Figure 1). Cisco Nexus 9300 platform leaf switches are Layer 2 and 3 nonblocking 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet switches with up to 2.56 Terabits per second (Tbps) of internal bandwidth.