Cisco N35-T-48X Full Product Description

1. Short Overview

• Suffix breakdown definition:
  • N35: Nexus 3550-T Triton programmable FPGA switch series
  • T: Triton FPGA programmable platform
  • 48: 48×SFP28 25G line-rate ports
  • -X: Standard base integrated chassis with dual USB, dual management ports, standard memory configuration
• Core differentiators vs older Nexus 3500 Algo Boost models: Fully programmable FPGA for custom packet pipelines, 25G native port speed, HBM high-bandwidth buffer, modern x86 CPU, latest NX-OS DME data model; distinct from copper TQ variants by all-SFP28 fiber-only port design.

2. Part Number Suffix Breakdown & Cross-Model Comparison

Full PN Breakdown

1. N35-T-48X: 1RU base programmable FPGA low-latency ToR switch chassis (Nexus 3550-T Triton)
   • 3550-T: Triton FPGA reconfigurable ultra-low-latency platform
   • T: Triton programmable FPGA architecture
   • 48: 48 native SFP28 25G line-rate ports (all active out of box, no license unlock)
   • X: Standard integrated chassis with dual redundant hot-swappable AC power supplies + dual hot-swappable fan trays, airflow PI/PE selectable at ordering
2. Airflow rule: Power supply and fan tray FRUs must match airflow type (PI or PE); mixed airflow modules trigger thermal protection shutdown.

Hardware Comparison Table

Factory Bare Chassis Included Hardware

1. 1RU standard 19-inch horizontal rack-mount bare switch chassis (power supplies and fan trays sold as separate FRUs, not pre-installed)Cisco
2. Front full-width port panel bank:
   • 48 × SFP28 bidirectional fiber ports (native 25G, auto-negotiate backward 10G SFP+ / 1G SFP modules, all ports permanently active with no license restriction)
3. Front integrated out-of-band management subsystem:
   • RJ45 hybrid RS232 serial console port
   • 1 × dedicated 10/100/1000BASE-T out-of-band MGMT Ethernet port
   • Micro USB port + USB Type-A flash storage port for offline firmware upload, configuration backup and POAP zero-touch provisioning files
   • Blue UID locator beacon LED for rack asset identification during maintenance
4. Front-panel global status LED: Green = normal operation, amber = critical hardware fault; separate fault indicators for each power supply and fan tray
5. Rear side dual hot-swappable AC power supply slots (empty chassis, PSUs ordered separately: N35-T-PAC-PI / N35-T-PAC-PE)
6. Rear hot-swappable dual fan tray slot (empty chassis, fan trays ordered separately: N35-T-FAN-PI / N35-T-FAN-PE)
7. Onboard system hardware: Multi-core x86 management processor, standard DDR4 memory, eUSB persistent Logflash storage, 1-PPS RF timing sync port for high-precision financial trading clock synchronization
8. Standard 19-inch rack mounting rails, front cable management brackets, hardware installation guide and global safety regulatory compliance documentation
9. No optical transceivers, power supplies or fan trays pre-installed; all FRUs sold separately as spare partsCisco

Items Not Included (Must Be Ordered Separately)

1. Hot-swappable AC power supplies: N35-T-PAC-PI (port intake) / N35-T-PAC-PE (port exhaust)
2. Hot-swappable dual fan tray assemblies: N35-T-FAN-PI / N35-T-FAN-PE matching PSU airflow
3. SFP28 / SFP+ transceivers for fabric ports: 10G/25G SR/LR/ER optical modules, passive Twinax DAC, active AOC fiber cables
4. Optional accessories: Serial console rollover cable, out-of-band management Ethernet patch cords, lockable front door, air filter panel
5. Software licenses: N3K-BAS1K9 base license unlocks full Layer 3 routing functionality; base Layer 2 switching enabled without additional license fees; FPGA custom development license optional for programmable pipeline customization

Supported Fabric & Parent Switch Compatibility

• Full unified fabric + lossless DCB FCoE: Cisco Nexus 9000 / 3000 series aggregation switches (NX-OS 10.x minimum)
• Layer 2/Layer3 Ethernet only: Nexus 7000 / 9000 Series data center spines
• Native interoperability with Nexus 2000 blade FEX devices for consolidated LAN/SAN storage fabrics
• SDN compatibility: OpenFlow 1.3, NX-API DME REST/JSON APIs, Ansible/Puppet/Chef DevOps automation, FPGA custom packet pipeline SDK

3. Hardware Port & Slot Layout

Front Panel 48 SFP28 25G Fiber Ports (All Active Native)

Front Out-of-Band Management Interfaces

1. RS232 serial console port for local CLI configuration
2. 1 × 10/100/1000BASE-T copper management port for remote SSH/SNMP/DCNM access
3. Micro USB + USB Type-A dual storage ports for offline config/firmware file import/export
4. 1-PPS RF timing synchronization port for financial trading nanosecond-precision clock alignment

Rear Panel Redundant FRU Slots

1. Dual hot-swappable AC power supply bays (empty chassis, PSUs purchased separately, hot-swap capable without switch reboot after installation)
2. Single hot-swappable dual-fan tray slot (empty chassis, fan tray purchased separately, hot-swap capable for maintenance without outage)

Front Panel LED Status Indicators

• Global chassis health LED (green normal / amber critical fault)
• Per-port dual-color link/activity LEDs for all 48 SFP28 fiber ports
• Separate fault LEDs for each power supply and fan tray assembly
• Remote-triggerable blue UID locator beacon LED for rack identification during maintenance windows

4. Hardware Performance Specifications

1. Total port capacity: 48 × 25G wire-speed ports (all active natively, no license expansion)
2. Total switching fabric bandwidth: 1.2 Tbps non-blocking full-duplex
3. Wire-speed forwarding throughput: 1.8 Bpps at minimum 64-byte Ethernet frames (all ports operate full line-rate L2/L3 simultaneously)
4. Forwarding latency: Sub-100 nanosecond programmable cut-through deterministic latency via VU35P FPGA; custom pipeline tuning reduces latency to <70ns for small-packet trading workloads
5. On-board packet buffer: 8GB HBM high-bandwidth memory (massive burst absorption vs MB-scale shared buffers of legacy 3500 series)
6. MAC address table capacity: 128,000 MAC entry storage
7. IPv4 Unicast Routing Table: 256,000 LPM prefix entries maximum
8. VLAN scaling: Up to 4096 standard IEEE 802.1Q tagged VLANs
9. Jumbo frame MTU: Configurable up to 9216 bytes for storage replication and large-scale big-data workloads
10. Spanning tree scale: 64 MSTP instances, 512 RSTP instances
11. Port-channel scaling: Maximum 64 EtherChannels, up to 48 physical ports per LACP fabric port-channel / vPC trunk
12. Zero-touch POAP provisioning: Automatic firmware synchronization, full configuration download and fleet-wide bulk upgrades triggered via a singleinstall allCLI command on the parent aggregation switch
13. Hardware lossless DCB & traffic offload features (fully controlled by NX-OS + FPGA programmable pipelines):
    • IEEE 802.1Qbb PFC and 802.1Qaz ETS lossless Ethernet for FCoE unified storage transport
    • Full software-supported VXLAN bridging and BGP EVPN control plane for massive-scale multi-tenant virtual machine mobility
    • User-programmable FPGA packet pipelines for custom HFT multicast normalization, traffic shaping, market data filtering
    • vPC, FEX vPC and Enhanced vPC (EvPC) redundant Layer 2 multipathing high availability
    • Four independent hardware priority queues per port with WRR/DRR traffic scheduling
    • PVLAN private VLAN isolation, UDLD link failure monitoring, broadcast/multicast storm control
    • IEEE 1588 PTP boundary clock for precise sub-nanosecond time synchronization in financial co-location environments
    • Ultra-high-precision nanosecond-level latency monitoring telemetry, extended SAN debug counters to track FCoE pause frames and storage buffer credit loss

Physical & Environmental Parameters

• Form Factor: 1 RU (43.7 mm height) standard 19-inch horizontal rack mount
• Dimensions (H × W × D): 43.7 mm × 445 mm × 480 mm (1.72 × 17.5 × 18.9 inches)
• Bare chassis weight (no PSUs, fans, transceivers): ~6.8 kg (15.0 lbs)
• Fully loaded maximum weight (dual PSUs + fan tray + fully populated SFP28 transceivers): ~9.2 kg (20.3 lbs)
• Operating temperature range: 0°C ~ 40°C (32°F ~ 104°F); certified altitude up to 3,000 meters (10,000 ft)
• Storage temperature range: -40°C ~ 70°C (-40°F ~ 158°F)
• Operating relative humidity: 10%–85% 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 compliance, RoHS 6 validated

AC Power Supply FRU Specifications (Separate Order N35-T-PAC Series)

• AC input range: 100–240 VAC, 50/60 Hz, typical energy efficiency 92–94%
• DC input range: -40 to -72 VDC negative telecom DC power supply (separate FRU airflow variant)
• Typical full-system power consumption: 220W with all 48 SFP28 ports fully populated; maximum peak power draw 380W
• Hot-swappable OIR replacement capability; no full switch reboot required during live PSU hardware swap
• MTBF: 380,000 hours under nominal operating conditions

5. NX-OS Software Feature Set (Centrally Managed via CLI / Cisco DCNM Graphical Platform)

Layer 2 Core Data Center Fabric Features

• IEEE 802.1Q trunking, PVLAN private VLAN isolation (max 4096 VLANs), transparent VTP mode
• RSTP/MSTP spanning tree suite with BPDU guard, root guard and aggressive UDLD link monitoring
• Static & dynamic LACP EtherChannels, vPC dual-active high availability to eliminate STP blocking links and maximize uplink bandwidth utilization
• DHCP snooping, dynamic ARP inspection, port security MAC address locking, broadcast/multicast storm control
• DCB PFC/ETS lossless Ethernet for Fibre Channel over Ethernet unified storage convergence
• IEEE 1588 PTP precision time synchronization optimized for ultra-low-latency high-frequency trading environments

Layer 3 Routing & Virtualization Features (Requires Optional N3K-BAS1K9 Base License)

• Unicast routing protocols: Static routes, OSPFv2, EIGRP, RIPv2, BGP-4, 48-way ECMP multi-path load balancing
• Multicast routing suite: IGMPv2/v3, PIM-SM, BiDir PIM for video streaming and inter-rack storage replication workloads
• First-hop redundancy protocols: HSRP, VRRP for gateway failover redundancy
• Hardware-accelerated IP ACLs (8192 ingress entries), route redistribution, prefix lists and route-map traffic segmentation policies
• Massive-scale routing table capacity enabled by large DDR4 memory and FPGA offload for ultra-large BGP EVPN multi-tenant cloud fabrics
• Software VXLAN bridging for virtual machine mobility (optimized FPGA-assisted processing)

Security, Monitoring & DevOps Automation Tools

• AAA authentication stack (TACACS+/RADIUS/Local user database), SSHv2 encrypted out-of-band management sessions
• SNMP v1/v2c/v3 remote monitoring, centralized syslog logging, RMON traffic statistics collection
• Cisco DCNM single-pane graphical fabric monitoring, automated provisioning and REST API integration for data center automation
• NX-API DME REST/CLI APIs, Python scripting, Embedded Event Manager (EEM) for custom automation workflows
• Native integration with Puppet, Chef, Ansible DevOps toolchains for infrastructure-as-code deployments
• GOLD Generic Online Diagnostics for continuous non-disruptive hardware health validation
• Unified bulk fleet-wide firmware upgrade via single parent switch CLI command for uniform fabric fleets
• Real-time streaming telemetry with ultra-precise nanosecond latency counters, extended buffer depth tracking unique to Triton FPGA hardware

6. Typical Deployment Scenarios for N35-T-48X Bare Chassis

1. Modern financial co-location ultra-low-latency programmable trading ToR switch: Triton VU35P FPGA enables custom market data multicast normalization, sub-100ns cut-through latency eliminates PHY-induced latency variance for high-frequency algorithmic trading workloads, native 25G SFP28 ports support modern 25G trading server NICs, massive 8GB HBM buffer eliminates burst packet loss during market open/close spikes. Bare chassis design allows customers to select matching PI/PE airflow power and fan FRUs to align with hot/cold aisle rack cooling standards.
2. Medium/large enterprise 25G all-fiber leaf-spine data center leaf switch: 48×25G SFP28 ports serve next-gen multi-tenant virtualization server racks connected via Nexus 9000 spine aggregation switches, merging general LAN and lossless FCoE iSCSI storage traffic on a compact 1RU non-blocking wire-rate switch tier, programmable FPGA pipelines support custom multi-tenant traffic isolation and QoS rules for cloud fabric workloads.
3. Large HPC and big-data parallel compute cluster rack aggregation: Compact 1RU footprint saves valuable rack space for ultra-high-density 25G compute farms, full 48-port native capacity eliminates need for license upgrades as compute farm scales, 8GB HBM buffer absorbs extreme bursty east-west parallel compute and distributed storage replication traffic without drops.
4. Large unified LAN/FCoE data center edge aggregation switch: Interoperable with Nexus 2000 blade FEX devices for mixed blade enclosure + standalone fiber server rack consolidation, supporting lossless FCoE storage transport over 25G fiber cabling to eliminate separate dedicated SAN access switches for large-scale storage deployments with massive BGP routing scale and heavy burst traffic requirements.
5. Custom SDN and research programmable switch deployments: Open FPGA development SDK allows network engineers to build fully custom forwarding pipelines for experimental networking, traffic measurement, intrusion detection and specialized low-latency data processing use cases unavailable on fixed-ASIC legacy 3500-series switches.
6. Standardized mass mixed-airflow next-gen data center uniform fabric rollout: Bare chassis modular FRU design lets operators standardize airflow hardware per rack pod, dual redundant hot-swappable power and fan modules simplify spare part inventory management, programmable FPGA architecture future-proofs switch hardware for upcoming feature and protocol upgrades without hardware refresh cycles.

Short Commercial Catalog Summary for Quotation