Product Overview

The Cisco Nexus N9K-C9508 is an 8-slot modular chassis within the Cisco Nexus 9500 Series. It is designed for organizations that require a flexible, scalable, and highly available data center switching platform rather than a fixed-port switch.

The chassis provides eight line card slots and supports a broad range of Cisco Nexus line cards, allowing organizations to select the required port density and Ethernet speeds according to their network architecture. Supported platform interfaces include 1G, 10G, 25G, 40G, 50G, 100G, 200G, and 400G Ethernet, depending on the installed line cards.

The N9K-C9508 can be deployed in large enterprise and service-provider data centers as a spine, core, aggregation, border-gateway, or end-of-row switching platform.

Modular Data Center Architecture

The Cisco Nexus N9K-C9508 is engineered around a modular architecture that enables organizations to scale network capacity without replacing the complete chassis. Different line cards and fabric modules can be selected to match application, bandwidth, port-density, and data-center topology requirements.

The chassis supports up to eight line cards, up to eight power supplies, up to six fabric modules, up to two supervisors, up to two system controllers, and up to three fan trays.

High-Density Port and Line Card Flexibility

Because the N9K-C9508 is a modular chassis, the final Ethernet port configuration depends on the selected line cards. Cisco N9500 Cloud-Scale line cards support Ethernet connectivity ranging from 1 Gigabit through 400 Gigabit Ethernet.

Selected Cloud-Scale line cards can provide up to 6.4 Tbps per line-card slot, allowing the N9K-C9508 to support very high-capacity data center switching configurations.

High-Capacity Fabric Architecture

Fabric modules provide the internal switching fabric between the installed line cards. The Cisco N9500 Cloud-Scale platform supports multiple fabric module families, including FM-G and FM-E/E2 options.

The N9K-C9508-FM-G provides up to 1.6 Tbps per line-card slot and 12.8 Tbps total fabric capacity. FM-E and FM-E2 fabric modules provide up to 800 Gbps per line-card slot with 6.4 Tbps total capacity for the 8-slot chassis.

Spine, Core and Aggregation Deployment

The Cisco Nexus N9K-C9508 is suitable for modern spine-and-leaf data center architectures where high bandwidth, predictable performance, scalability, and operational resiliency are required.

It can operate as a high-capacity spine switch, data center core, aggregation platform, border gateway, or end-of-row switch. Its modular design enables network administrators to build configurations around specific connectivity and traffic requirements.

Cisco NX-OS and ACI Support

The Cisco Nexus 9500 platform supports both Cisco NX-OS and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). This gives organizations flexibility in selecting the operating and management architecture best suited to their data center environment.

In NX-OS mode, the platform supports foundational Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking along with advanced technologies such as VXLAN, BGP-EVPN, Segment Routing, MPLS, and automation through Cisco NX-APIs.

In Cisco ACI mode, the platform can participate in policy-based, automated data center fabrics designed for simplified provisioning, centralized policy management, and application-centric operations.

High Availability and Redundancy

High availability is a key part of the Cisco Nexus 9500 architecture. The N9K-C9508 supports redundant supervisors, multiple fabric modules, multiple power supplies, system controllers, and hot-swappable fan trays.

A pair of redundant supervisor modules can operate in an active-standby state-synchronized architecture. Multiple fabric modules provide load balancing and redundancy so that the system can continue operating with reduced capacity if a fabric module becomes unavailable.

Power and Cooling Architecture

The N9K-C9508 provides a scalable power architecture designed for high-density data center configurations. The chassis supports up to eight power supplies, allowing organizations to configure power capacity and redundancy according to the installed line cards and fabric modules.

Hot-swappable fan trays provide chassis cooling and support the airflow requirements of high-density networking hardware. The appropriate fan tray and fabric module combination should be selected according to the desired chassis configuration.

Recommended Applications

The Cisco Nexus N9K-C9508 is designed for demanding enterprise and data center environments that require modular scalability, high availability, and high-speed network connectivity.