Cisco N5K-C5596UP-FA Full Product Description

1. Short Overview

• UP = Unified Port: Every fixed SFP+ port can be dynamically toggled via CLI between 1/10G Ethernet/FCoE or native 1/2/4/8G Fibre Channel without dedicated FC hardware cards
• FA = Front-to-Back airflow: Cold air intake from front panel, hot exhaust rear, fully compatible with standard hot/cold aisle data center rack layouts

2. Part Number Suffix Breakdown & Factory Pre-Integrated Hardware

Full PN Decoding

1. N5K: Nexus 5500 unified FCoE data center switch product family
2. C5596UP: 2RU high-density base chassis model; UP = Unified Port software reconfigurable SFP+ interfaces
3. FA: Front-to-Back directional cooling airflow

Hardware Pre-Installed at Factory (Included in SKU)

1. 2RU standard 19-inch rack-mount passive midplane chassis
2. Two N55-PAC-1100W hot-swappable AC power supplies (N+1 redundant power architecture, factory preloaded)
3. Four N5596UP-FAN front-to-back hot-swappable fan trays (4-fan redundant cooling, single fan failure triggers SNMP alerts without traffic outage)
4. 48 fixed unified SFP+ 1/10G front panel ports (dual-mode Ethernet/FCoE or native Fibre Channel)
5. Three independent rear OIR hot-swappable expansion module slots for scalable uplink/storage port expansion
6. Complete out-of-band management interfaces: RJ45 serial console, dual 10/100/1000BASE-T out-of-band management Ethernet, USB Type-A diagnostic flash port
7. Standard 19-inch rack mounting rails, front cable management brackets, hardware installation & global safety compliance documentation

Items Not Included (Must Be Ordered Separately)

• SFP+/SFP optical transceivers, Twinax copper DAC cables for all fixed unified ports and expansion module interfaces
• N55-M series GEM expansion modules (unified port, pure Ethernet, native Fibre Channel, 40G QSFP or dedicated Layer 3 routing module)
• Software feature licenses: C1-N5596 Cisco ONE full feature bundle, XL extended scale, standalone FCoE Enabler, L3 Routing, MPLS, DMM Data Migration, IOA Acceleration
• Optional accessories: Lockable front door, extended cable management kit, air filter panel, serial console rollover cable

Core Differentiators vs Smaller Nexus 5548UP-FA

• Double fixed port density (48 unified ports vs 32)
• Triple expansion slots (3 vs 1) for maximum scalability up to 96 total 10G ports
• Higher power capacity (1100W PSUs vs 750W) supporting full load with three expansion modules
• Four redundant fan trays vs two for superior thermal headroom in high-density rack deployments
• Double fabric bandwidth (1920 Gbps vs 960 Gbps) and higher forwarding throughput

3. Hardware Port & Slot Layout

Front Panel 48 × Unified SFP+ Fixed Ports

1. Ethernet/FCoE Mode: Dual-speed 1G/10G SFP/SFP+, compliant with IEEE DCB standards (802.1Qbb PFC Priority Flow Control, 802.1Qaz ETS Enhanced Transmission Selection) for lossless unified storage-Ethernet traffic transport
2. Native Fibre Channel Mode: 1/2/4/8G Fibre Channel for direct disk array, tape library and SAN storage attachment

Rear Three OIR Hot-Swappable Expansion Slots

1. N55-M16UP: 16 additional unified SFP+ ports (Ethernet/FCoE or native FC)
2. N55-M1604: 6×10G SFP+ pure Ethernet/FCoE uplink module
3. N55-M1404: Hybrid 4×8G FC + 4×10G FCoE/Ethernet storage module
4. N55-M8FC: 8-port 1/2/4G native Fibre Channel module
5. N55-M6FC: 6-port 8G high-speed native Fibre Channel module
6. N55-M4Q: 4×40G QSFP uplink module for leaf-spine fabric interconnection
7. N55-DL3: Dedicated Layer 3 routing GEM module (provides 160 Gbps hardware L3 forwarding throughput, occupies one expansion slot)

Rear Power & Cooling Subsystems

• Dual factory pre-installed N55-PAC-1100W AC power supply bays, fully OIR hot-swappable for N+1 power redundancy
• Four pre-installed hot-swappable fan trays with front-to-back airflow; mixed airflow fan modules cannot be mixed inside the chassis

Front Panel LED Status Array

4. Hardware Performance Specifications

1. Full non-blocking crossbar switching fabric aggregate bandwidth: 1920 Gbps full-duplex (1.92 Tbps)
2. Wire-speed Layer 2 forwarding throughput: 1428 Mpps at maximum 10G port speed
3. Cut-through switching latency: ~3 microseconds for standard data center frame sizes
4. Base Layer 2 MAC address table capacity: 32,000 entries (XL license doubles table scale and FEX support count)
5. Maximum VLAN segmentation: 4094 VLANs per logical fabric partition
6. Port-channel scaling limit: 1024 LACP logical trunk bundles, maximum 16 physical ports per vPC/ISL trunk
7. Maximum supported Nexus 2000 FEX fabric extenders: 24 FEX leaf units (XL scale license required)
8. Native ASIC hardware offload feature suite:
   • Complete lossless FCoE protocol stack: PFC priority flow control, ETS bandwidth allocation, VNTag tagging, FC-NVMe low-latency storage tunneling
   • OTV cross-data-center overlay encapsulation, LISP workload mobility for multi-pod distributed fabrics
   • FCIP tunnel compression, write acceleration, tape pipelining for long-distance disaster recovery SAN replication
   • DMM non-disruptive data migration, IOA storage I/O acceleration, onboard streaming LAN/SAN telemetry export
   • VXLAN/NVGRE virtual overlay tunneling for multi-tenant cloud virtualized workloads

Physical & Environmental Parameters

• Form Factor: 2 RU (8.8 cm height), standard 19-inch EIA horizontal rack mount
• External dimensions (H × W × D): 8.8 cm × 43.9 cm × 74.9 cm; extended depth 87.6 cm with full cable management kit installed
• Pre-populated chassis weight (2×1100W PSUs + four fan trays, no expansion modules/transceivers): ~15.9 kg (35 lbs)
• Fully loaded maximum weight (dual PSUs + four fans + three expansion modules): ~21.55 kg (47.5 lbs)Cisco
• Operating temperature range: 0°C ~ 40°C (32°F ~ 104°F); certified altitude up to 3,000 meters
• Storage temperature range: -40°C ~ 70°C (-40°F ~ 158°F)
• Operating relative humidity: 8%–80% non-condensing; storage humidity 5%–95% non-condensing
• Compliance Certifications: FCC Class A, UL 60950-1, CE, VCCI Class A, NEBS Level 3, GR63 seismic Zone 4, RoHS 6 compliant, FIPS 140-2 Level 1 validated

N55-PAC-1100W AC Power Supply Spec (Factory Pre-Installed)

• Input: Universal 100–240V AC, 50/60Hz
• Rated output power: 1100W per single PSU; typical full-load power draw ~980W with three expansion modules and L3 GEM installed
• Hot-swappable OIR replacement, N+1 redundant power architecture

5. Full NX-OS Feature Set Supported

Layer 2 Ethernet & Converged FCoE Storage Fabric

• Single default VDC architecture (Nexus 5500 series does not support multiple independent VDC partitions)
• 802.1Q VLAN tagging, PVLAN private VLAN anti-spoofing isolation
• MSTP multi-instance spanning tree for Layer 2 loop prevention, vPC dual-active peer-link redundancy for storage/Ethernet uplinks
• Complete lossless FCoE protocol stack with hardware slow drain detection and buffer credit isolation to eliminate storage packet loss
• NPV/NPIV FCoE edge virtualization to reduce upstream MDS SAN director control-plane overhead
• POAP zero-touch automatic switch provisioning for mass rack rollouts
• Native Nexus 2000 FEX fabric extender support for high-density server leaf access aggregation
• Dynamic unified port mode switching via CLI to toggle every SFP+ port between Ethernet/FCoE and native Fibre Channel without hardware replacement

Multilayer Routing & Cross-Data Center Interconnect (N55-DL3 L3 GEM Module Mandatory)

• Full IPv4/IPv6 dynamic routing protocols: OSPF, EIGRP, BGP, static routing, ECMP load balancing
• VRF virtual routing and forwarding for multi-tenant Layer 3 traffic isolation
• Licensed IVR Inter-VSAN Routing for secure cross-storage-fabric data forwarding
• OTV Overlay Transport Virtualization for Layer 2 workload mobility across geographically separated disaster recovery sites
• LISP Locator/ID Separation Protocol for multi-pod distributed data center interconnection
• Full carrier MPLS stack including LDP, VPLS, VPWS, EVPN-FC dual-stack multi-tenant transport
• Hardware-accelerated FCIP tunnel compression, write acceleration and tape pipelining for long-distance off-site backup replication
• iSCSI multi-protocol gateway functionality via N55-M expansion modules for IP-attached storage consolidation

Advanced QoS & Traffic Prioritization

• Four hardware priority queues per unified port for tiered classification of storage I/O, VM east-west traffic, management and backup streams
• Ingress frame policing and egress bandwidth shaping to throttle low-priority tape backup and replication traffic
• Pre-built QoS templates optimized for OLTP databases, all-flash NVMe storage, virtual server workloads, tape archives and disaster recovery replication
• Dedicated high-priority low-latency queue for real-time unified communications and enterprise database workloads
• DCBX media optimization for converged FCoE LAN/SAN traffic over 10G unified SFP+ ports

Enterprise & Service Provider Security Suite

• Port security with static MAC locking to block unauthorized server/storage device attachment
• Granular RBAC multi-tier administrative access control, native integration with Cisco ISE identity engine
• SSHv2 encrypted remote management, SNMPv3 secure monitoring, AES encrypted startup configurations, DH-CHAP FCoE inter-fabric authentication
• Port lockdown, VSAN read-only permission controls, complete audit logging for all fabric configuration changes
• FIPS 140-2 Level 1 compliance for government, financial and regulated enterprise deployments
• Cisco TrustSec security group tagging for end-to-end policy segmentation across campus and data center fabrics
• IPv6 over Fibre Channel support for modern dual-stack management networks
• Secure Boot and anti-counterfeit hardware validation to prevent unauthorized firmware tampering

Monitoring & SAN/LAN Management Tools

• Cisco DCNM centralized graphical converged LAN/SAN fabric monitoring, provisioning and REST API automation
• Dual isolated out-of-band management Ethernet ports for offline device access during fabric-wide outages and analytics export
• External USB flash storage for offline NX-OS firmware upgrades, running configuration backup and offline diagnostics
• CDP automatic neighbor discovery for Nexus/MDS fabric devices
• Real-time streaming telemetry: port throughput, latency, frame error counters, SFP optical transmit power diagnostics
• Fault alert notifications via email, syslog and SNMP traps
• GOLD Generic Online Diagnostics for continuous hardware health validation without traffic interruption
• Onboard Python interpreter + NX-API REST interfaces for custom data center automation scripts

6. Typical Deployment Scenarios for N5K-C5596UP-FA

1. High-density medium/large virtualized data center EoR/ToR aggregation core: 48 unified front ports plus three expansion slots scale up to 96 total 10G ports, flexibly split for server leaf links and direct native Fibre Channel disk/tape storage attachment without dedicated FC expansion cards
2. Enterprise financial/mainframe zSystems converged unified storage core: Native FCoE + direct FC port mode eliminates extra FC module costs for large tape library and disk array environments; factory dual high-wattage power + four redundant fan trays remove single power/cooling failure points
3. Multi-building enterprise campus core converged LAN/SAN switch: Front-to-back airflow fits standard cold aisle racks, built-in FCIP hardware offload provides asynchronous cross-site disaster recovery replication between primary and DR data centers
4. Medium-to-large MPLS service provider multi-tenant metro PoP aggregation gateway: Full carrier-grade MPLS/EVPN feature suite supported via separate licenses, VLAN/VSAN multi-tenant isolation separates independent enterprise customer LAN/SAN fabrics on a single chassis
5. Legacy Nexus 5000 fabric migration high-capacity upgrade: Backward compatible with existing 10G SFP transceivers while enabling flexible unified port FC/Ethernet switching, larger MAC tables, VXLAN virtualization and modern NX-OS DCI automation workflows
6. Centralized enterprise large-scale tape library backup fabric aggregation core: Dedicated SAN aggregation switch utilizing multi-port FCIP port-channels to primary production FCoE fabrics for asynchronous off-site archive replication workloads; unified front ports can switch to native FC for direct high-capacity tape array attachment

7. Standard Package Contents of N5K-C5596UP-FA Factory Pre-Populated SKU

Separately Mandatory Components (Not Included in This Bundle)

• Optional N55-M series GEM expansion line/service modules for three rear expansion slots
• SFP+/SFP optical transceivers and Twinax DAC copper cables for all unified front ports and expansion module interfaces
• Optional N55-DL3 Layer 3 routing GEM module (required to enable hardware Layer 3 forwarding capability)
• Optional feature software licenses: C1-N5596 XL Scale, IVR Inter-VSAN Routing, FCIP SAN Extension Enabler, Mainframe FCoE Enabler, OTV Data Center Interconnect, IOA I/O Acceleration, DMM Data Migration, MPLS XL Scale
• RS232 serial console rollover cable, mini USB console cable, fiber/copper patch cords, rack cable management accessories, lockable front door, air filter panel

Short Commercial Catalog Summary for Quotation