Product brief

The Cisco Nexus 9400 Series Switch features a redesigned chassis with a height of 4 rack units and a depth of 24 inches. It includes 8 expansion slots, which can support various port configurations:

• 64 ports of 400G
• 128 ports of 200G
• 176 ports of 10/25/50G

Additionally, all ports on the Nexus 9400 series have MACsec capability. The chassis architecture also accommodates a supervisor module and up to 8 expansion modules. It ensures fan tray redundancy with 5 fan trays and power supply redundancy.

Furthermore, the centralized modular architecture of the Cisco Nexus 9400 series allows scalability up to 25.6 Tbps. This scalability is achieved through a combination of field-replaceable switch cards, expansion modules, power supplies, and fans.

The Cisco Nexus 9400 Series centralized modular switches expand the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series portfolio by introducing a new chassis that supports high port-density 400 Gigabit expansion modules.

As data centers continue to evolve to accommodate next-generation applications—such as machine learning—that drive significant growth in intra-data-center traffic bandwidth, data-center operators seek compact, high-capacity, and efficient switches to upgrade their data-center fabrics. These switches must provide security, automation, visibility, analytics, and assurance. The Cisco Nexus 9400 series is designed to meet these requirements and is based on Cisco Cloud Scale technology.

Cisco Nexus 9400 Series supervisor front-side

Cisco Nexus 9400 Series LEMs (N9K-X9400-8D, N9K-X9400-16W, and N9K-X9400-22L)

Features and benefits

Architectural flexibility

• Purpose-Built Operating System:
  • Cisco NX-OS Software offers comprehensive, proven innovations.
  • The modular design isolates faults while improving availability.
• Industry-Leading SDN Solution:
  • Cisco ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) provides centralized automation and policy-based application profiles.
• VXLAN EVPN Support:
  • Standards-based VXLAN EVPN fabrics, including hierarchical multisite support.
  • Refer to VXLAN network with MP-BGP EVPN control plane for more information.
• Three-Tier BGP Architectures:
  • Enables horizontal, nonblocking IPv6 network fabrics at web scale.
• Comprehensive Layer-3 Protocol Support:
  • Supports unicast and multicast routing protocols (IPv4 and IPv6).
  • Includes BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, RIPv2, PIM-SM, SSM, and MSDP.
• Segment Routing (SR and SRv6):
  • Allows MPLS packet forwarding and traffic engineering without RSVP-TE.
  • Enhances network scalability and virtualization.
• Cisco IP Fabric for Media:
  • Facilitates migration from SDI routers to IP-based infrastructure.
  • Single cables handle bidirectional traffic flows of varying sizes without physical changes.
• Nexus Dashboard Data Broker:
  • Provides complete network observability.
  • Helps identify security threats, address performance bottlenecks, ensure data compliance, and plan capacity.

Extensive programmability

• Day-0 Automation (POAP):
  • Power-On Auto Provisioning reduces provisioning time significantly.
• DevOps Integration:
  • Industry-leading integrations with DevOps configuration management tools like Ansible.
  • Extensive native YANG and industry-standard OpenConfig model support via RESTCONF, NETCONF, and gNMI.
• REST API and Data Management Engine (DME):
  • Interact with the network using REST APIs and DME.
• Model-Driven Telemetry:
  • Enhances network observability.
• Third-Party Application Hosting (Cisco Application Framework):
  • Supports hosting third-party applications.

High scalability, flexibility, and security

• Flexible forwarding tables support up to two million shared entries.
• IEEE 802.1ae MAC Security (MACsec) capability on all ports allows traffic encryption at the physical layer and provides secure server, border leaf, and leaf-to-spine connectivity.

AI/ML networking

The Cisco Nexus 9400 Series supports innovative congestion management and flow control algorithms, along with low latency and telemetry features to meet the design requirements of AI/ML fabrics.

• Priority Flow Control (PFC): This key capability prevents Ethernet frame drops by signaling, controlling, and managing Ethernet flows along the path. It achieves this by sending pause frames to appropriate senders.
• Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN): The platform provides end-to-end notification per IP flow by marking packets that experience congestion. Importantly, it does so without dropping traffic. ECN statistics, including the number of marked packets, can be tracked.
• Lossless Transport for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE): The platform supports RoCE with data-center bridging (DCB) protocols. Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) reserves bandwidth per priority class in network contention situations, and the Data Center Bridging Exchange Protocol (DCBX) facilitates the discovery and exchange of priority and bandwidth information with endpoints.
• Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED): This congestion-avoidance technique allows Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches to detect and react to network congestion by marking flows that could cause issues.
• Intelligent Buffer Management: Cisco’s innovative buffer management distinguishes mice flows (short-lived) from elephant flows (long-lived). Different queue-management schemes are applied based on their forwarding requirements during link congestion.
• Approximate Fair Dropping (AFD) with Elephant Trap (ETRAP): AFD identifies elephant flows based on user-defined thresholds, measuring byte counts of incoming flows. ETRAP helps differentiate long-lived elephant flows from short-lived mice flows.
• Dynamic Packet Prioritization (DPP): This capability separates mice flows and elephant flows into separate queues, allowing independent buffer allocation.

Hardware and software high availability

• Virtual Port-Channel (vPC) Technology: vPC technology eliminates the need for Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) by providing Layer-2 multipathing. It allows fully utilized bisectional bandwidth and simplified Layer-2 logical topologies without disrupting existing management and deployment models.
• 64-Way Equal-Cost Multipath (ECMP) Routing: ECMP enables Layer-3 fat-tree designs, preventing network bottlenecks, enhancing resiliency, and allowing capacity expansion with minimal disruption.
• Software Maintenance Upgrades (SMUs): SMUs address specific defects, providing swift resolutions for critical issues.
• In-Service Software Upgrades (ISSUs): ISSUs allow software upgrades while maintaining traffic forwarding, minimizing downtime.
• Redundant Power Supplies: The switches feature hot-swappable power-supply units (PSUs) with N+2 redundancy and fans with N+1 redundancy.

Cisco Nexus Dashboard

• Cisco Nexus Dashboard: This platform revolutionizes data-center and cloud-network operations by combining simplicity, automation, and analytics. It integrates services such as Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC), Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights (NDI), Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO), and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker (NDDB).
• Licensing Information: Cisco Nexus Dashboard is included with all Cisco Nexus 9000 switch tiered licenses. Specific licensing requirements apply to individual services within the dashboard:
  • Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller: Requires a Cisco Data Center Networking (DCN) Essentials license.
  • Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator: Requires a Cisco DCN Advantage license.
  • Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights: Requires either a Cisco DCN Premier license or the Cisco DCN Day-2 Ops add-on license.

Ordering information

Table 1.  Cisco Nexus 9400 Series system specifications

Table 2.  Cisco Nexus 9400 Series Switch chassis specifications

Table 3.  Cisco Nexus 9400 Series supervisor, linecard, and switch-card specifications

Table 4.  Cisco Nexus 9400 Series performance and scalability specifications