The Cisco Nexus® 7000 Series Switches are the foundation of the Cisco® Unified Fabric solution. Designed to meet the requirements of mission-critical data centers, these switches deliver exceptional availability, outstanding scalability, and the proven and comprehensive Cisco NX-OS Software data center switching feature set.

The Cisco Nexus 7700 Switches are the latest extension to the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series modular switches. With more than 83 terabits per second (Tbps) of overall switching capacity, the Cisco Nexus 7700 Switches delivers the highest-capacity 10, 40, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports in the industry, with up to 768 native 10-Gbps ports, 384 40-Gbps ports, or 192 100-Gbps ports. This high system capacity is designed to meet the scalability requirements of the largest cloud environments.

The Cisco Nexus 7700 switches have operational and feature consistency with the existing Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches, using common system architecture, the same application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology, and the same proven Cisco NX-OS Software releases.

The Cisco Nexus 7700 Fabric-2 modules (Figures 1, 2 and 3) for the Cisco Nexus 7700 Series switches are separate fabric modules that provide parallel fabric channels to each I/O and supervisor module slot. Up to six simultaneously active fabric modules work together, delivering up to 1.32 Tbps per slot. Through the parallel forwarding architecture, a system capacity of more than 42 Tbps is achieved with the six fabric modules. The fabric module provides the central switching element for fully distributed forwarding on the I/O modules.