Hardware arc

The Cisco Nexus Series switches are modular and fixed-port network switches designed for the data centre. Cisco Systems introduced the Nexus Series of switches on January 28, 2008. The first chassis in the Nexus 7000 family is a 10-slot chassis with two supervisor engine slots and eight I/O module slots at the front, as well as five crossbar switch fabric modules at the rear. Beside the Nexus 7000, there are also other models in the Nexus range.

All switches in the Nexus range run the modular NX-OS firmware/operating system on the fabric. NX-OS has some high-availability features compared to the well-known Cisco IOS. This platform is optimised for high-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet.