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The Cisco Nexus 9000 series, the fruit of Cisco's Insieme spin-in, is more than another fast router -- it's a change in the way that high-end routers are designed and built.
And, in the very near future, it will be a cornerstone of Cisco's application-centric infrastructure (ACI), a tighter melding of applications, servers, and network infrastructure than has ever existed.
We got a first look at Cisco's newest shipping hardware, the Nexus 9508 chassis and the 36-port 40Gbps line cards, in Cisco's own labs in San Jose, Calif. Although we weren't allowed to touch the hardware, we did supervise performance tests that confirmed the awesome throughput of the Nexus 9508.
With Internet-sized packets (1,500 octets), a fully populated Nexus 9508 delivered line speed (just shy of 40Gbps) on each of 288 ports, with zero packet loss, and average latency of 624 nanoseconds (that's .00006 milliseconds) port-to-port on the same card, or 2050 nanoseconds when crossing from one line card to another.
When we mixed up the ports a little bit so that every port sent traffic to every other port (meshed throughput testing), the per-port average speed was nearly identical, although latencies jumped by about 50% over the inter-card latency, with a range of 2,412 nanoseconds (for 64-octet frames) to 6,007 nanoseconds (for 1518-octet frames) and a high of 26,928 nanoseconds (for jumbogram frames of 9216 octets). Again, there was no packet loss.
In IP multicast testing, the Nexus 9508 kept up its line-rate, zero-loss performance, whether one port transmitted to 287 others (1 multicast group with 287 receivers) or broken up into 20 groups of 14 ports each.
These tests were done in Layer 3 mode -- each port was on a different subnet, and the device was routing, not switching the traffic. Cisco doesn't have the switching code ready quite yet, but claims that when the Nexus 9000 is switching instead of routing, performance will remain at line rate.
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We also looked at power consumption, an important concern for data center managers. The fully-loaded Nexus 9508 chassis with 288 active 40 Gb fiber ports draws about 11 watts/port with no traffic...