Based on Cisco^® Cloud Scale technology this platform supports cost-effective ultra-high-density cloud-scale deployments an increased number of endpoints and cloud services with wire-rate security and telemetry. The platform is built on modern system-architecture designed to provide high performance and meet the evolving needs of highly scalable data centers and growing enterprises.

The product is designed to support innovative technologies such as Media Access Control Security (MACsec) Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) tunnel endpoint VTEP-to­-VTEP overlay encryption CloudSec and Streaming Statistics Export (SSX). MACsec is a security technology that allows traffic encryption at the physical layer and provides secure server border leaf and leaf-to-spine connectivity. SSX is hardware-based consisting of a module that reads statistics from the ASIC and sends them to a remote server for analysis. Through this application users can better understand network performance without any impact on the switch control plane or CPU.

Cisco provides two modes of operation for Cisco Nexus® 9000 Series Switches. Organizations can use Cisco NX-OS Software to deploy the switches in standard Cisco Nexus switch environments (NX-OS mode). Organizations can also deploy the infrastructure that is ready to support the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI^™) platform to take full advantage of an automated policy-based systems-management approach (Cisco ACI mode).