Cisco Nexus ports stretched to take 40GE and 100GE loads

If you want 10 Gigabit Ethernet to take off on servers, then you need fat backbones on the campuses and in the data centers to absorb the increase in traffic. And so Cisco Systems is ramping up the bandwidth on its Nexus 7000 series of end-of-row converged Ethernet switches as well as on its Catalyst 6500 campus switches. …

[Lance 3]

Not likely

"This 6094 line card sports 44 ports running at 40GE and 176 ports running at 10GE if you use the four-way splitters on it. This new line card will be available in April and costs $36,000."

No way is that accurate. First, if you take the newest Supervisor offered, you are looking at 80Gbps of fabric bandwidth per slot. 44 * 40Gbps is a serious over subscription rate. Four ports would be 2:1 which is doable, what is not is 22:1. If the traffic is going between ports, sure it works, but as soon as the fabric is needed, there will be problems. I highest over-subscription I would expect is 4:1.

I could see getting 44 ports on a 6513 chassis with 11 of these cards (assuming 4-ports per card), but not 44 ports per card.

[James Turner]

Indeed. They've typoed the name (It's a 6904 card, not a 6094). And the 44 ports is for a full 6913 chassis. It's 4 ports per card.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps708/data_sheet_c78-696623.html if you're into your hardware porn.