White Paper Abstract:
The Cisco Nexus 7000 platform is modular in its design, with an emphasis on redundant critical components throughout all of its subsystems. A highly modular and compartmentalized approach to systems design is applied to all facets of the platform, spanning across the physical, environmental, power, and system software aspects of its architecture. Additionally, a distinct functional separation between control plane and forwarding data plane is emphasized in its design in order to allow continuous operation and zero service disruption during planned or unplanned control-plane events or failures. This document is intended to provide details of the high availability features and options across all of these areas in order to provide the reader a better understanding of the hardware and software fault tolerance capabilities of the Cisco Nexus 7000 platform architecture.