The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches are the foundation of the Cisco® Unified Fabric solution. Designed to meet the requirements of mission-critical data centers these switches deliver exceptional availability outstanding scalability and the proven and comprehensive Cisco NX-OS Software data center switching feature set.

The Cisco Nexus 7700 platform is the latest extension to the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series modular switches. With more than 83 terabits per second (Tbps) of overall switching capacity the Cisco Nexus 7700 platform delivers the highest-capacity 10 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports in the industry with up to 768 native 10-Gbps ports 384 40-Gbps ports and 192 100-Gbps ports. This high system capacity is designed to meet the scalability requirements of the largest cloud environments.

The Cisco Nexus 7700 platform switches have operational and feature consistency with the existing Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches using a common system architecture the same application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology and the same proven Cisco NX-OS Software releases.

The Cisco Nexus 7700 F3-Series module (Figure 1) is a low-latency high-performance high-density 100 Gigabit Ethernet module designed for mission-critical data center networks. This module delivers 1.8 billion packets per second (bpps) of distributed Layer 2 and Layer 3 forwarding and up to 1.2 Tbps of data throughput. A Cisco Nexus 7700 18-Slot Switch fully populated with the Cisco Nexus 7700 F3-Series module can support up to 192 wire-rate 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports (Table 1) and deliver up to 28.8 bpps and 38.4 Tbps of switching performance.

The Cisco Nexus 7700 F3-Series module is based on the Cisco Nexus F3-Series switch-on-chip (SoC) ASIC. This type of design increases performance while lowering the power and cooling requirements of the module. The Cisco Nexus F3-Series SoC is an innovative Cisco ASIC powered by a flexible packet engine which makes it excellent for building the network infrastructure for public and private cloud environments. The Cisco Nexus F3-Series engine supports all the foundational networking protocols needed to build Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks. It also provides hardware support for Cisco Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) and Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) which enable building scalable virtual overlay networks. The Cisco Nexus 7700 F3-Series module enables customers to transparently interconnect their data centers with protocols such as Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS).