Gain a Fabric-Extensible, Innovative Platform

Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches are designed to deliver high-density top-of-rack (ToR) Layer 2 and Layer 3, 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet with unified ports in compact one-, two-, and four-rack-unit form factors. The Cisco Nexus 5000 Series includes the Cisco Nexus 5500 and 5600 platforms as part of the Cisco Unified Fabric portfolio.

The comprehensive Cisco NX-OS feature set and 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet scalability of the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series deliver high performance, operational efficiency, and design flexibility.

Features and Capabilities of the Nexus 5600

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.
• Cisco FabricPath is supported for scalable Layer 2 networks.

Features and Capabilities of the Nexus 5500

The Cisco Nexus 5500 Switches simplify convergence through broad connectivity support. This makes them ideal top-of-rack access switches for traditional and converged deployments.

Scale

The Cisco 5500 switches are designed to meet the scalability demands of today's data centers. They offer:

• Up to 1152 ports in a single management domain using Cisco FEX architecture
• Up to 96 unified ports

Operational Efficiency

Operations are simplified with:

• A single point of management with the Cisco FEX architecture
• Programmability for Python scripting, Tcl scripting, the Cisco ONE Platform Kit (onePK), and OpenFlow

Flexible Architecture

The Cisco 5500 switches deliver deployment flexibility to meet varying customer needs:

• Broad connectivity support includes Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, 10-BASE-T, 40 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks, native Fibre Channel, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).
• Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA) is supported for simplified virtualized and cloud deployments.
• Cisco FabricPath is supported for scalable Layer 2 networks.