Cisco Datacenter Nexus 9300 switches with DPUs - Game Changer

Cisco Datacenter Nexus 9300 switches with DPUs - Game Changer 

The Cisco N9300 Series Smart Switches—a new family of data center switches including programmable data processing units (DPUs) that can embed stateful services directly into the data center fabric at scale and speed for greater simplicity, increased service throughput, and cost efficiency—excite us to meet growing needs for scalability, security, and efficiency.

What is a DPU? 

It stands for Data Processing Unit, and it adds an extra layer of data processing to the switch. DPUs enable the deployment of extra services like as packet inspection, NAT, IPsec, telemetry, and more! It delivers amazing power and more processing to the network device.

The Nexus 9300 Smart Switches, which were launched this week, will aid with power processing and policy management for the Cisco Hypershield program. This effectively extends policy, segmentation, inspection, and security to the top of rack devices, between data-center interconnects, or at the cloud edge.

What's different then ?

By incorporating DPUs into the new switches, we are transforming data center networking platforms into high-capacity, multifunctional service hosts. DPUs can easily handle complicated data processing operations and provide innovative services that go beyond basic networking capabilities.

Driven by the Cisco Silicon One E100 ASIC, Cisco Smart Switches provide high speed connection, rich telemetry, line-rate encryption and power economy for contemporary data center operations. These Smart Switches with the AMD DPUs offer 800G service throughput.

DPU acceleration enables a broad range of network and security services, including stateful segmentation, large-scale NAT, IPsec encryption, IDS/IPS, event-based telemetry, and DDoS defense. The switch's first stateful service will be Layer-4 stateful segmentation* with Cisco Hypershield.

As per Cisco, they are introducing DPUs with next generation switches N9324C which is a 24-port, 100G switch with 800G service throughput and the N9348Y2C6D which is a 48-port 25G, 2-port 100G and 6-port 400G with 800G service. 

What's in the start ?

Cisco Hypershield will only support L4 stateful firewalling at launch. Cisco plans to provide more services in the future, including DDoS protection, NAT, IPSec encryption, IDS and IPS, and telemetry.

These switches are being positioned by Cisco for a variety of applications, such as Data Center Interconnect (DCI), cloud on-ramps from a colo to the cloud, and ToR switches in a data center.