Interconnection Solutions for Cisco Nexus 3500 from buzai232's blog

Cisco Nexus 3000 series switch has been introduced in April 2011 to provide line-rate layer 2 and layer 3 performance. This series is designed to be low-latency, flexible, high-density and power-efficient to meet current needs in data centers. It also includes various models as Cisco Nexus 3048 switch, Cisco Nexus 3100 platform switches, Cisco Nexus 3100-V platform switches, Cisco Nexus 3200 platform switches and Cisco Nexus 3500 series switches. This post will mainly introduce the Cisco Nexus 3500 series switches and their applicable interconnection solutions.
Cisco Nexus 3500 platform uses the Cisco Algo Boost technology to achieve excellent Layer 2 and 3 switching latencies of less than 200 nanoseconds. With the help of Algo Boost technology, Cisco Nexus 3500 can perform hitless NAT (Network Address Translation) for IPv4 unicast routed packets without incurring any additional latency. Cisco Nexus 3500 is also available for active buffer monitoring to speed up the collection of buffer utilization data in hardware. The traffic mirroring function of Cisco Nexus 3500 helps to enhance the switch capability for both network troubleshooting and in-service network monitoring.
There are two kinds of configurations for Cisco Nexus 3500 series switches. Cisco Nexus 3548 (as shown in the picture) is the compact 1RU switch containing 48 fixed SFP+ ports for 1, 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet. It enables the total switching capacity of 960 Gbps. Similarly, Cisco Nexus 3524 has the identical hardware as Cisco Nexus 3548. However, its software license is different from Cisco Nexus 3548 which only allows the operating of 24 ports. And its switching capacity is only 480 Gbps. If you want to active all the 48 ports of Cisco Nexus 3524, another license is required to enable the rest 24 ports.
For the low latency of Cisco Nexus 3500, there are three configurable modes. First is the normal mode. This mode is excellent for environments needing low latency and high scalability. Second is the warp mode. It is efficient for customers with smaller environments who demand the lowest latencies. Last mode is the warp SPAN. It is used when a stream of traffic in the entering port simply needs to be copied to a list of outgoing ports as quickly as possible without processing or modification. The following picture shows the warp mode hardware data path.related site