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Density and resilience: Built for today’s data centers, the switches are designed just like the servers they
support. Ports and power connections are at the rear, close to server ports, helping keep cable lengths as
short as possible and delivering to rack servers benefits traditionally offered only on blade servers. Hot-
swappable power and fan modules can be accessed from the front panel, where status lights offer an at-a-
glance view of switch operation. Front-to-back or back-to-front cooling is consistent with server designs,
supporting efficient data center hot- and cold-aisle designs. Serviceability is enhanced with all customer-
replaceable units accessible from the front panel.
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Energy efficiency: The 10-Gbps switches help data centers operate within their space, power, and cooling
parameters while reducing their carbon footprints. The switch power supplies are also capable of
maintaining 90 percent efficiency at load conditions of as low as 25 percent utilization. This capability allows
the switch to make efficient use of power while still being appropriately sized to support the conditions of a
full system load.
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Low latency: Cut-through switching enables these switches to support approximately 1 microsecond of
port-to-port latency for any packet size with features enabled.
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Intelligent Cisco Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) and Encapsulated SPAN (ERSPAN): SPAN and
ERSPAN can be used for troubleshooting and robust monitoring of traffic. The SPAN and ERSPAN
capabilities are nondisruptive, with only extra bandwidth capacity used for SPAN and ERSPAN traffic.
Enhancements include more efficient allocation of bandwidth to SPAN and ERSPAN traffic so that any
fabric bandwidth not used for data traffic can be allocated to SPAN or ERSPAN traffic. The switch can
support up to 31 line-rate SPAN and ERSPAN sessions.
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Flexible buffer management: The 10-Gbps switches support a 25-MB packet buffer shared by every 3
ports of 40 Gigabit Ethernet or every 12 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The flexible buffer management
capability allows dynamic tuning of the sizes of the shared and dedicated buffers in the event of congestion.
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Multicast enhancements: These switches support line-rate Layer 2 and 3 multicast throughput for all
frame sizes. They offer optimized multicast replication through the fabric and at the egress point. Support is
provided for 32,000 multicast routes and for Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) snooping tables
in hardware. Multicast enhancements include flow-based hashing for multicast traffic over a port channel
and enhanced Bidirectional Protocol-Independent Multicast (Bidir-PIM) support. The switch also supports
IP-based forwarding for IGMP snooping.
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Inter-Switch Link (ISL): The Cisco Nexus 5672UP-16G switch supports 16-Gbps Fibre Channel ISLs in a
Fibre Channel–only environment or, in the case of FCoE, 40-Gbps ISLs. With six such 40-Gbps links
available, the ISLs support bandwidth of 240 Gbps. Improved buffer-to-buffer credits (up to 128) on the new
switch now provide support for 16-Gbps Fibre Channel ISLs across distances of up to 16 kilometers.
For a complete list of the latest software features supported on the Cisco Nexus 5600 10-Gbps platform, see the
product bulletin at http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/nexus-5000-series-switches/bulletin-
c25-735319.html.