The Cisco Nexus N9K-C93180YC-EX is a versatile and high-performance switch meticulously engineered for the demands of a modern data center. As a key component in a leaf-spine architecture, it's designed to handle cloud-scale applications with ease. The switch is built to provide high port density and flexibility, offering 48 fixed 1/10/25-Gbps SFP28 ports and 6 fixed 40/100-Gbps QSFP28 ports. This allows for a flexible mix of high-speed connections to servers and uplinks to the spine layer, providing a clear migration path from 10G to 25G at the access layer and from 40G to 100G at the spine, which helps protect your investment. Furthermore, this switch is fully enabled for Cisco Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI), which provides a policy-driven, application-centric approach to network automation. This capability simplifies management and allows for more agile and secure network deployments. Built on the Cisco Cloud Scale ASIC, the N9K-C93180YC-EX is highly programmable, allowing for advanced telemetry and visibility. It also supports a large number of MAC addresses, routes, and ACLs, ensuring it can scale to meet the needs of growing data centers. Its support for multiple speeds and its ability to be deployed in both ACI and Cisco NX-OS modes make it a future-proof solution and an ideal choice for businesses looking to build a high-performance, scalable, and automated data center network.
It's an excellent choice for:

• Top-of-Rack (ToR) in a Leaf-Spine Architecture: This is its primary and most common use case. Its high-density 1/10/25 Gbps ports are perfect for connecting servers and other end-point devices, while the 40/100 Gbps QSFP28 ports serve as high-bandwidth uplinks to the spine switches.
• High-Performance Data Center Networks: The switch's impressive switching capacity of 3.6 Tbps and forwarding rate of over 2.6 bpps make it well-suited for high-traffic environments, ensuring low latency and efficient handling of large data flows, especially for big data and virtualization applications.
• Cloud-Scale Deployments: The N9K-C93180YC-EX is designed to meet the evolving needs of cloud-scale environments. It supports a high number of endpoints and offers features like telemetry and wire-rate security, which are crucial for cloud services.
• Investment Protection: The flexibility to operate at 1, 10, or 25 Gbps on its downlink ports and 40 or 100 Gbps on its uplink ports provides a clear migration path for businesses. This allows for a gradual upgrade of the network infrastructure without requiring a complete hardware replacement.
• Converged LAN and SAN Environments: This switch is also capable of supporting Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), making it suitable for converged networks that require both LAN and SAN traffic on a single, reliable platform.