Cisco  N9K-SUP-A

The Cisco Nexus 9500 Series support redundant half-width supervisor engines that are responsible for control-plane functions. The switch software, Enhanced NX-OS, runs on the supervisor modules. The redundant supervisor modules take active and standby roles supporting stateful switch over in the event of supervisor module hardware failure, and In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU), allowing software upgrade/maintenance without impacting production services.

The CPU complex of the Nexus 9500 supervisor is based on the Intel Romley platform with 4 core Sandy Bridge Exon processors. The default system memory size is 16 GB that is field upgradable to 48 GB. There is a built-in 64 GB SSD to provide additional on-board non-volatile storage. The high speed multi-core CPU and the large memory build the foundation for a fast and reliable control plane for the switch system. Control plane protocols will benefit from the ample computation horsepower and achieve fast initiation and instantaneous convergence upon network state changes. Additionally, the expandable large DRAM and multi-core CPU provides sufficient compute power and resources to support c-group based Linux containers in which third party applications can be installed and run in a well-contained environment. The on-board SSD provides extra storage for logs, image files and third party applications.

The supervisor engine has a serial console port (RJ-45) and a 10/100/1000 Ethernet management port (RJ-45) for out-of-band management. Two USB 2.0 interfaces are supported using an external USB flash storage for image, syslog, configuration file transfer and other uses. A Pulse-per-second (PPS) clock input port on the supervisor module supports accurate timing synchronization.

The communications between the supervisor and the fabric modules or line cards utilize either Ethernet Out-of-Band Channel (EOBC) or Ethernet Protocol Channel (EPC). Both channels have a central hub on the System Controllers providing redundant paths to the System Controllers.