Cisco NEXUS 9800 FABRIC MODULE FOR 4-SLOT CHASSIS N9K-C9804-FM-A

Cisco Nexus® 9800 Series Switches provide high-density 400G solutions in a chassis designed for future transition to high-density 800G and higher speeds.

Product overview

The Cisco Nexus 9800 Series modular switches expand the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series portfolio with a new chassis that supports very high-speed and port-density line cards.

Data centers continue to evolve to support next-generation applications and high performance compute workloads that drive massive growth in intra-data-center traffic. Furthermore, the rapid increase in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) workloads have challenged data-center fabrics to support faster job completion times to minimize idle time for the compute nodes. To support this growth, data-center operators require scalable, high-capacity, high-speed, and highly efficient switches.

The Cisco Nexus 9800 Series chassis architecture can scale from 57 Tbps to 115 Tbps with a combination of various first-generation line cards and fabric modules. Each line card slot in the chassis can support line cards that offer 400GE or 100GE ports now and higher speeds in the future.

The design of the Cisco Nexus 9800 Series chassis is a significant improvement on the previous-generation modular chassis design, with better power distribution and connectors, fans, and a thermal design that allow the chassis to scale up to higher Ethernet speed line cards and fabric modules in the future. These design principles allow the doubling of total system capacity with next-generation line cards and fabric modules that support higher speed ports such as 800G at the same port density per slot as that of current-generation line cards.

The Cisco Nexus 9800 Series Switch line cards and fabric modules are built with power-efficient, high-performance, and high-capacity Cisco® ASICs that support dynamic flowlet load balancing, fully shared on-die packet buffering, and line-rate performance for small packets. The Cisco ASIC also has built-in ingress Virtual Output Queueing (VOQ) capabilities that provide the basis for faster job completion times, which is critical for AI/ML fabrics. The ASIC provides these capabilities without compromising on data-center spine/super-spine features, making the Cisco Nexus 9800 Series Switches an optimized platform to build fabrics that can support high-bandwidth applications and compute-intensive AI/ML workloads across data centers of varying sizes and scales.

The fabric capacity in a Cisco Nexus 9800 Series chassis is delivered by up to eight fabric modules with n+1 fabric module redundancy. Varying the number of fabric modules allows the chassis to provide fabric module redundancy and sufficient line-rate capacity for line cards with different port speeds and port densities.

Furthermore, the chassis architecture supports control-plane redundancy with dual supervisors, data-plane redundancy with up to eight fabric modules, fan-tray redundancy with four fan trays, and power-supply redundancy with up to 12 high-efficiency power supplies.

Moreover, the high capacity and port density of the Cisco Nexus 9800 Series Switches enable data-center fabrics to scale up even while keeping the required number of spines lower. This results in lower overall infrastructure costs and higher overall power efficiency across the data center.

The Cisco Nexus 9800 Series has two chassis models:

1. The Cisco Nexus 9800 8-slot chassis which supports eight line card slots and three power-supply trays.

2. The Cisco 9800 4-slot chassis, which supports four line-card slots and two power-supply trays.

Figure 1.

Cisco Nexus 9800 8-slot chassis and 4-slot chassis

Figure 2.

Cisco Nexus 9800 supervisor (1st Generation)

The Cisco Nexus 9800 Series supports a 36-port 400G QSFP-DD line card. The QSFP-DD ports are also backward compatible with QSFP28 and QSFP+ modules. This line card provides up to 14.4 Tbps capacity with at least seven fabric modules. If the chassis is configured with eight fabric modules, the chassis would provide 7+1 fabric module redundancy to this line card. This line card also supports line rate MACsec encryption on all ports. Furthermore, each 400G port also supports 2x 100G, 4x 100, 4x 25, and 4x 10G breakout options.

Figure 3.

Cisco Nexus 9800 36-port QSFP-DD 400G line card with MACsec

The Cisco Nexus 9800 Series supports a 14-port 400G QSFP-DD + 34-port QSFP28 100G line card. The QSFP-DD ports are also backward compatible with QSFP28 and QSFP+ modules. This line card provides up to 9 Tbps capacity with at least seven fabric modules. If the chassis is configured with eight fabric modules, the chassis would provide 7+1 fabric-module redundancy to this line card. This line card also supports line-rate MACsec encryption on 16 QSFP28 100G ports. Furthermore, each 400G port also supports 2x 100G, 4x 100, 4x 25, and 4x 10G breakout options. This card also offers the flexibility to be operated in 100G only mode with just 4 fabric modules, enabling better power efficiency.

Figure 4.

Cisco Nexus 9800 14-port QSFP-DD 400G + 34-port QSFP28 100G line card