Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric Data Sheet

Cisco Nexus^® Hyperfabric is a cloud-managed network fabric data-center solution, delivered as a service, that enables customers to easily design, deploy, manage, and scale multiple fabrics globally with a minimum of expertise.

Product overview

Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric enables customers to easily design, deploy, and scale any number of data-center fabrics located anywhere. Delivered as a fabric-as-a-service solution, it reinvents and simplifies every step of IT operations, ensuring repeatable and predictable outcomes.

Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric is a cloud-managed vertical stack solution consisting of purpose-built hardware, software, a cloud controller, day-2 operations, automation, and Cisco support that eliminates complexity. IT, application and DevOps teams manage the full lifecycle of designing, ordering, deploying, validating, monitoring, and scaling fabrics without requiring deep networking or operational expertise.

Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric vertical stack solution

Customers log in to Nexus Hyperfabric to begin building a validated fabric design tailored to their desired host and port capacity, oversubscription, and environmental considerations such as cabling and power. Customers then define the Layer-2 and Layer-3 networks the fabric exposes to hosts, maps them to ports, and specifies the routing needed to connect the fabric to the rest of the network. Nexus Hyperfabric is integrated with Cisco’s ordering tools to guarantee there are no errors when converting the components in a design into a bill of materials When the Cisco 6000 Series Switches arrive on site and are deployed, they automatically connect to the cloud, to be claimed and provisioned by the cloud controller with a zero-touch plug-and-play approach. This process takes just minutes and results in a fully operational network fabric. Assertion-based monitoring of the availability and reliability of the fabric and connected resources are continuously verified, and the root cause of any issue detected is immediately identified. Later, if it is necessary to change the capacity or shape of the design, customers can modify the in-flight design, approve the changes, and follow the entire design to deploy the process again. Nexus Hyperfabric provides guidance for all the physical changes needed to migrate the old topology to the new desired state, including cabling adjustments, and it reconfigures itself automatically.

Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric lifecycle

Features and benefits

Table 1.        Feature and benefits

Prominent feature

Cloud-managed solution

A cloud controller operated by Cisco manages your fabrics regardless of where they are geographically located and eliminates the need to deploy and manage your own on-premises provisioning and monitoring tools. The cloud controller is a scalable, distributed, multitenant service hosted in the public cloud. Starting from fabric design, the cloud controller spans Nexus Hyperfabric’s entire operational lifecycle. The service includes capacity and environmental planning, fabric tenant port allocation, bill-of-materials, and cabling planning, device claiming and assignment, day-2 monitoring, software management, and fabric redesign, all in a single interface with a consistent workflow. An API-first approach allows you to integrate your operation tools or use built-in integrations with leading industry provisioning and monitoring products.

Easy enough for IT generalists and application and DevOps teams to operate

Designed for simplicity, Cisco Nexus Hyper fabric enables operators with a diversity of skills to reliably deliver working solutions with minimal effort. Customers do not need to manage controller or switch configurations, understand complex fabric protocols, or manage the switch-network operating system. The cloud controller guides you through all stages of building and maintaining the fabric – from designing to ordering to deploying, to validating, to monitoring, to scaling, to collaborating. This ensures standardization, repeatability, and reliability. Scaling the fabric up or down can be done easily. Ergonomically, it offers an operational model akin to cloud hosting rather than on-premises tooling.

Add fabrics with ease

High-performance fabrics

Fabrics need high-performance bandwidth, reliability, simplicity, and a small footprint. With Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric, you may deploy switches wherever your organization requires them – all they need is connectivity to the public internet to tether to the cloud controller. Port speeds in the Cisco 6000 Series Switches range from 10 to 400 Gb, allowing you to deploy scalable, high-performance fabrics. Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric switches are fully cloud-managed – all visibility and control are done through the cloud controller rather than through a command line interface. Fabrics can scale down to a single or a pair of switches or scale up to a full spine-leaf topology to cover edge and primary data-center deployments. Fabrics are based on Ethernet VPN-virtual extensible LAN (EVPN-VXLAN) underlay networks that are automatically provisioned and monitored without the need to be integrated with your network’s addressing and upstream routing.

Vertical stack solution

Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric is a purpose-built data-center network fabric-as-a-service solution consisting of hardware, software, cloud management, day-2 automation, and Cisco support. Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric manages the cloud controller, which is the single point of administration for all fabrics regardless of location. Switches connect to the cloud for full lifecycle management, and fabrics are automatically built and maintained by the controller. Telemetry, monitoring, and Cisco^® TAC support are all part of the solution.

Cloud-managed switch

Platform support

Table 2.        Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric switch platform support

Licensing

A subscription license is needed for every Cisco 6000 Series Switch that is deployed and used. Subscription licenses may be initially purchased for three, five, or seven years and may be renewed. The subscription-feature license tiers are based on fabric use cases. Currently, two packages are planned: one (“Essentials”) for general-purpose fabrics and the second (“Premier”) for AI fabrics. All the switches in a fabric must use the same license tier; however, an organization may concurrently manage multiple fabrics that use different license tiers.

Table 3.        License feature tiers

Product sustainability

Information about Cisco’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives and performance is provided in Cisco’s CSR and sustainability reporting.

Table 4.        Cisco environmental sustainability information

Cisco and partner services

Cisco and partner services offer a wide range of services to help accelerate your success in connecting Cisco 6000 Series Switches to the Nexus Hyperfabric cloud controller. Our innovative service offerings are delivered through a unique combination of people, processes, tools, and partners and are focused on helping you increase operational efficiency and improve your network control. Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric solution provides proactive support with the Cisco SMARTnet^® service to help you resolve mission-critical problems with direct access at any time to Cisco network experts and award-winning resources. Spanning the entire network lifecycle, our service offerings help increase investment protection, optimize network operations, support migration operations, and strengthen your IT expertise.

For more information, please visit www.cisco.com/go/services.

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Try before you buy

Anyone with a Cisco ID or CCO ID may log into the Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric cloud controller at hyperfabric.cisco.com to request an organization identifier; they can then begin building network fabric blueprints for free.

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