Hardware components

The device has a modular and scalable mechanical construction that allows a wide range of flexibility in installation, fabric design, and maintenance. The device can be mounted with the cables facing either the front or the rear of the equipment rack.  It consists of the following hardware components:

• Up to four slots for hot-swappable port blade assemblies, providing up to 192 64Gb/s or 256 32Gb/s Fibre Channel ports for device or ISL connectivity. Flexport technology allows QSFP ports on this blade to be configured for FCoE operation at 4x10GbE, 4x25GbE, and 40GbE speeds when using an FC32-64 port blade. For a list of supported transceivers for these blades, see Supported Transceivers and Cables.
• Two half-size slots for control processor (CP) blades:
  • A single active CP blade can control all the ports in the device.
  • The standby CP blade assumes control of the device if the active CP blade fails.
• Two slots for core routing (CR) blades:
  • The CR blade interconnects all port blades.
  • The blades support up to 16 Gen 7 QSFP56 (ICL) ports.
  • ICL ports allow interconnection with neighboring director chassis.
  • Both CR blades are active and can be hot-swapped.
  • For a list of supported transceivers for these blades, see .
• Up to four slots for modular, hot-swappable 34-port SX6 extension blades. Blades provide 16 32Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) ports supporting 4, 8, 16, and 32Gb/s FC ports. Extension blades enable long-distance communication over an existing IP infrastructure. For a list of supported transceivers for these blades, see Supported Transceivers and Cables.
• Modular, hot-swappable field-replaceable units (FRUs):
  • Two fan assemblies, available with NPI or NPE airflow.
  • Up to two power supplies, available with the NPI or NPE airflow.
    • See the "Power Supply Specifications (per PSU)" in the X7 Director Technical Specifications for maximum output power, input voltage, input line frequency, and other specifications for your power supply model.
    • See the "Power Supply Requirements" section in the X7 Director Technical Specifications for the minimum number of power supplies required for operation and redundancy when different input voltages are used, such as low line and high line AC.
    • See the "Power Consumption" sections in the X7 Director Technical Specifications for power output data and the minimum number of power supplies for supported input voltages.
    • Redundant primary power connections ensure high availability. Each power supply assembly has its own connector, so the number of primary power connections is two for optimum efficiency and redundancy.
  • Two World Wide Name (WWN) cards located on the nonport side of the device behind the WWN card bezel.
  • Port blades use small form-factor pluggable (SFP+, QSFP+, and QSFP28) optical transceivers. For details on supported transceivers per blade type, see Supported Transceivers and Cables.
  • Core routing blades use QSFP56 optical transceivers. For a list of supported transceivers for these blades, see Supported Transceivers and Cables.
• Chassis door. This door must be installed to meet EMI compliance certification.
• Two vertical cable management finger assemblies. These combs install on the equipment rack for cable management.