These chassis support the Cisco Nexus 9500 R-Series line cards and fabric modules. These line cards offer 100-, 40-, 25-, 10-, and 1-Gigabit Ethernet ports with deep buffers and large tables, delivering up to 9.6 Terabits per second (Tbps) per slot, for a total of 76.8-Tbps in the 8-slot chassis.

Cisco Nexus 9500 Platform R-Series line cards

The Cisco Nexus 9500 platform is designed as a Clos fabric that interconnects each line card directly with each rear-mounted fabric module. All traffic between the line cards is load balanced across all fabric modules providing optimal bandwidth distribution within the chassis. This load-balancing capability provides enhanced system reliability and redundancy. The switch continues to operate even in the event of a loss of a fabric module, albeit at a lower capacity, as the remaining fabric modules continue to provide switching capacity to the line cards. Some of these line cards can connect to 1 or 2 additional fabric modules to provide N+1 or N+2 redundancy.