Based on Cisco Cloud Scale technology, the Cisco Nexus® 9300-EX and 9300-FX platforms are the next generation of fixed Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches. The new platforms support cost-effective cloud-scale deployments, an increased number of endpoints, and cloud services with wire-rate security and telemetry. The platforms are built on modern system architecture designed to provide high performance and meet the evolving needs of highly scalable data centers and growing enterprises.

Cisco Nexus 9300-EX and 9300-FX platform switches offer a variety of interface options to transparently migrate existing data centers from 100-Mbps, 1-Gbps, and 10-Gbps speeds to 25 Gbps at the server, and from 10- and 40-Gbps speeds to 50 and 100 Gbps at the aggregation layer. The platforms provide investment protection for customers, delivering large buffers, highly flexible Layer 2 and Layer 3 scalability, and performance to meet the changing needs of virtualized data centers and automated cloud environments.

The platform hardware is capable of collecting comprehensive Cisco Tetration Analytics™ telemetry information at line rate across all the ports without adding any latency to the packets or negatively affecting switch performance. This telemetry information is exported every 100 milliseconds by default directly from the switch’s Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). This information consists of three types of data:

- Flow information: This information contains information about endpoints, protocols, ports, when the flow started, how long the flow was active, etc.

- Interpacket variation: This information captures any interpacket variations within the flow. Examples include variation in Time To Live (TTL), IP and TCP flags, payload length, etc.

- Context details: Context information is derived outside the packet header, including variation in buffer utilization, packet drops within a flow, association with tunnel endpoints, etc.