Cisco 9300 switch performance

[carl_townshend]

Hi All

I am looking at some switch upgrades, I need 10G base T copper and 25G uplinks.

We normally use the C9200-24UXB switches, these have bigger buffers (64MB)

I need a few more ports and the best forwarding rate possible, so I am looking at the 9300X-48TX, this has 32MB buffers but has a lot higher switching capacity and forwarding rate.

I assume I won't need these bigger buffers as the backplane of the 9300X switch has a higher capacity and forwarding rate, thus will have no need to "buffer" the traffic ? is this correct ?

Cheers

[Leo Laohoo]

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@carl_townshend wrote:
these have bigger buffers (64MB)

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Standard Catalyst-range per-port buffer had always been 64 Mb.  

Something beefier (deeper buffers) would fall into the Nexus range.

[carl_townshend]

Hi Leo

Sorry to correct you, the normal 9300s have 16 or 32Mbit buffers by default, see below

[Leo Laohoo]

Mea culpa.

[Reza Sharifi]

Hi Carl,

I agree with Leo! If this is for server/data center environment with VMs and storage, and you need more buffer, take a look at the Nexus series. 

HTH 

[Joseph W. Doherty]

"I assume I won't need these bigger buffers as the backplane of the 9300X switch has a higher capacity and forwarding rate, thus will have no need to "buffer" the traffic ? is this correct ?"

Not necessarily.

Many modern Enterprise or DC switch fabrics will handle all ports, concurrently, at wire-speed.  Additionally fabric ingress buffering often leads to head-of-line blocking.  So, port buffering is often for egress.

Actually egress port buffering is only needed to handle concurrent multiple egress requests, bursty too fast requests and/or TCP BDP.

Not knowing anything about your network, cannot comment on what your optimal buffer needs are.