Simplified 400-Gbps Cabling Deployment Solutions With Cisco Nexus 3000 Series Switches

With the ever-expanding bandwidth needs that virtualization and cloud technologies have applied to the data center network, staying ahead of the curve is extremely important to maintain a competitive advantage. This document introduces products from Cisco and Panduit that address the associated needs. This document also maps the logical designs to the physical layout and displays those products deployed within the data center network. The first section of this document provides specifications for the Cisco Nexus ® 3000 Series Switches. The second section describes the cabling scenarios and the optics needed for the interworking of the products from both companies. The last portion of the document summarizes Panduit product offerings and next steps.

Introduction

Data centers are undertaking some profound changes due to ongoing data-center consolidation, virtualization, and cloud technology and increasing demands on application workload extensity and agility. All these driving forces are changing every facet of the data center, flattening its topology from the traditional core-aggregation-access three-tier design to the spine-leaf two-tier architecture, boosting its bandwidth capacity from 1GE at access and 10GE at aggregation to 10GE/25GE/50GE/100GE at the leaf and 40GE/100GE/400GE at the spine, and morphing its operational model from a per- box CLI manual approach to a system-level automated process through Restful API. While performance, bandwidth, and latency are remaining as the most important elements in data-center networks, management and operational agility and simplicity have risen to the top of mind of data-center architects and operators.

Cisco Nexus 3000 Series Switches are the next-generation products aiming to take data-center networks through all of these transitions and even beyond. With their unprecedented performance and port density, they are well suited for both the traditional three-tier design and spine-leaf design, providing forwarding capacity for fast increasing server-to-server traffic. They are also equipped with unmatched programmability and automation functionalities to transform the data- center network management model.