Discover the details about Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extender #NB Tech A13

Cisco Nexus 2000 series fabric extenders are a new transformation to data centers design. These extenders have simplified the operations as well as access architecture of the data center. Cisco has designed the 2000 series extenders for providing connectivity for blade servers and racks. Cisco Nexus 2000 series fabric extenders work as a remote line card or module which needs to be connected to a parent switch. A distributed modular system is formed with fabric extender and parent switch which enable physical topologies having great flexibility as well as the benefit of end-of-the-row and top-of-the-rack deployment.

Benefits of Cisco Nexus 2000 Series fabric extender

Cisco Nexus 2000 series offers numerous exceptional advantages and thus are the amongst the stand alone devices. Below listed are major benefits of Cisco Nexus 2000 series fabric extender, have a look –

Simplified operations –

• There is a single point of management. Since the fabric extender serves as a line card thus, the entire configuration of the devices is controlled via parent switches.
• Provides for auto-configuration as well as provides for plug and play management.
• There is a smooth transition to 10 Gigabit Ethernet from Gigabit Ethernet which helps to pass all the traffic to the parent switch.

Architectural flexibility –

• These fabric extenders provide a wide range of options for connectivity such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, and 100 Megabit Ethernet servers.
• It provides a quick as well as easy expansion of capacity of Network
• In addition, it also provides various port density options 48, 32 and 24 ports.
• It allows the decoupling of layer 1 and layer 2 topologies, thus providing high flexibility in architectural design including EoR, MoR, ToR deployment.

Highly scalable access to server –

• Highest density per rack unit is provided by Cisco Nexus 2000 series fabric extender.
• It reduces initial capital expenditure by allowing the transparent addition of the network capacity as per requirement.
• It rolls in pre-wired racks of servers with transparent connectivity and ToR fabric extender to an upstream parent switch thus, enabling quick expansion of the network capacity.

Business benefits –

• Cisco 2000 series fabric extender is quite cost effective as 10 times the bandwidth and approximately double price of Gigabit Ethernet is provided by the scalable 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
• These fabric extenders cut the cost of cabling around 85% as it supports EoR, ToR, and MoR. With ToR, short cables are used which reduces the overall cost. In addition, to the cost of cabling, Capital Expenditure is also reduced up to 40% and cooling expenditure up to 30%.
• Cisco Nexus 2000 series extenders support virtual Port Channel (vPC) and In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU) technology. The technology extends the resiliency of data center deployments.

Know about architecture of Cisco Nexus 2000 series fabric extender

Cisco Nexus 2000 fabric extension technology is based on virtual machines and servers with technologies namely – M-FEX and Adapter-FEX respectively. Below is a brief of both the technology –

VM-FEX –

Instead of making use of software switch within the hypervisor, Cisco has started to provide switching of VW-traffic thus extending the switching fabric to server hypervisor. This technology serves a long way in achieving enhanced performance as well as consolidation of the physical access layer and virtual access layer.

Adapter FEX –

Solutions are extended into servers with the help of Adapter FEX technology. Logical partitioning of server adapter in multiple vNICS is enabled by adapter-FEX. Each vNIC serves as a physical NIC port and satisfies the requirement of network connectivity for every application.

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Deployment scenarios of Cisco Nexus 2000 series

Deployment Scenario in which Cisco Nexus 2000 series fabric extender can be deployed are –

• Rack servers with 10 Gigabit Ethernet, 1 Gigabit Ethernet, or 100 Megabit Ethernet and Nexus 2000 series extenders along with a parent switch can be placed in the locations listed below –
• Nexus 2000 series fabric extender can easily be placed at top of rack residing Cisco Nexus parent switch either at the end or middle of the
• Cisco 2000 series fabric extender can easily be placed with nexus parent Switch either at the end or at the middle of the row.
• FCoE deployments and 10 Gigabit Ethernet using the servers with CNAs (converged network adapters) for the unified fabric environments.
• High-performance computing, Low-latency environments.
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet blade and 1 Gigabit Ethernet blade servers with the pass-through blades.
• Server racks with 1 Gigabit Ethernet management, with 100 Megabit Ethernet, or with iLO (integrated lights-out) management, and integrated lights-out interfaces.

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