Cisco N2K-C2224TP-1GE Network Switch Networking

Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders

Product Overview

The Cisco Nexus® 2000 Series Fabric Extenders (FEX) comprise a category of data center products designed to simplify data center access architecture and operations. The Cisco Nexus 2000 Series uses the Cisco® FEX-link architecture to provide a highly scalable unified server-access platform across a range of 100 Megabit Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, unified fabric, copper and fiber connectivity, rack, and blade server environments. The platform is ideal to support today's traditional Gigabit Ethernet while allowing transparent migration to 10 Gigabit Ethernet, virtual machine-aware unified fabric technologies.

The Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders behave as remote line cards for a parent Cisco Nexus switch. The fabric extenders are essentially extensions of the parent Cisco Nexus switch fabric, with the fabric extenders and the parent Cisco Nexus switch together forming a distributed modular system. This architecture enables physical topologies with the flexibility and benefits of both top-of-rack (ToR) and end-of-row (EoR) deployments (Figure 1).