Cisco Nexus 34180YC to Supermicro SYS-1029U-TR25M Servers

March 19, 2021

For the past five to seven years the most common speed of connection between a Top of Rack (ToR) leaf switches to subtending computer and storage servers has been 10Gbps. Many hyperscale data centers and even larger enterprise data centers are migrating these access links to 25Gbps. These connections may be constructed using 25Gbps Direct Attached Copper cables (DACs), Active Optical Cables (AOCs), or with a pair of SFP28 25Gbps optical transceivers and an appropriate duplex fiber optic jumper cable.

To depict this application with real-world products, a ToR switch from Cisco’s Nexus 3000 series and a rack-mounted server from Supermicro have been selected. The only other pieces required are Fiberconcepts SFP-25G-SR-s multimode transceivers and OM4 multimode patch cables.

TOR LEAF SWITCH: Cisco Nexus 34180YC

The Nexus 3400 platform is part of the latest generation of the fixed Nexus®3000 Series Switches. The 3000 series is squarely targeted for ToR applications. All members are compact (1RU) fixed configuration products. Across this family of products essentially all available rates of optical ethernet are offer, from 1G to 400G.

The Nexus 34180YC is an ideal switch to demonstrate the used of the INTCERA brand, Cisco compatible SFP-25G-SR-S transceiver. This switch offers great flexibility in ports speeds, covering 1G, 10G, 25G, 40G and 100G rates. The 34180YC is programmable allowing the user to customers to tailor packet forwarding behavior to the needs of their applications. For example, high speed financial trading applications can be optimized for the lowest possible latency. This switch is equipped with 48 SFP+/SFP28 ports (1G/10G/25G) and 6 QSFP+/QSFP28 (40G/100G) ports. The switch supports full line rate Layer 2/3 switching on all these ports, totaling 3.6 Terabits/sec and 1.4 Gigapackets/sec.

The 34180YC may be equipped with a wide range of optical transceiver interface types across the many rates mentioned above. The tables below include the compatible transceiver types for the two categories of ports in the switch.