Annual Report 2015

Data Center Network Upgrade

Spine - Cisco Nexus 9508 Switch

Leaf - Cisco Nexus 9396PX Switch

The major benefits of the data center up-

grade are as follows

Data center networks have evolved in recent years to

address the changing nature in the volume and nature of

data center traffic. The modern data center workload is

now dominated by server-to-server traffic with intensive

communication across hundreds of servers. Additionally,

application architecture has also changed and there is a

huge growth in the use virtualization, microservices, and

IP storage.

The increasing demands have led to the development

of next-generation of DC switches to be based on

application-specific circuits (ASIC), because the ASIC is

the single largest factor influencing switch performance,

capabilities, power profiles, and cost. The Cisco 9000

Nexus switches is the latest generation of DC switches

with high performance ASICs.

UAEU recently upgraded the entire data center from

Brocade MLX switches to Cisco 9000 Nexus switches

in order to provide the high performance, high port

density, reliability and scalability. Considering the

future requirement, where data centers are going to

shrink in size and moving to the virtualized environment

to reduce the power consumption and to provide a

central administration for all the network and server

environment.

As shown on the figure, the new DC design is a spine

and leaf design where the Cisco Nexus 9508 switches are

used as Spine or Aggregation switches and Cisco nexus

9396 as Leaf or Access switches.

It provides high density 40 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit

uplinks today and can go up to 100 Gig in future

Providing a very high performance of 30 Tbps of

throughput

Most power efficient, programmable and fastest

packet forwarding

ACI enabled platform

Provides a high level of security based on the

Nexus-OS kernel, that provides the modularity and

programmability

Error free and port based security in a meshed

environment

Aggregation Switch

8 payload slots

Up to 1152 full line-rate 1- and 10-Gbps ports

Up to 288 full line-rate 40-Gbps ports

48 ports of 1- and 10-Gbps fiber Enhanced Small

Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP+)

12 ports of 40-Gbps fiber Quad SFP (QSFP)

Used as access switch to connect servers

Used as services switch to connect firewalls, load

balancers, etc

Used as border switch to connect to connect to the

campus core