le Cisco has introduced new iconography to describe the Nexus line. The new icons are shown in Figure 18-11. Notice that all of the Nexus icons have the same atomic-looking pattern with arrows on the front or bottom of the icon. Nexus Iconography Nexus 2000 Nexus 5000 Nexus 7000 Figure 18-11. New Nexus icons Nexus Design Features The Nexus switches are designed from the ground up to be highly resilient and scalable. The Nexus architecture is built with the following features: Management and control plane is separate from data plane In a nutshell, this means the act of forwarding packets is kept separate from the management and maintenance of the system. While you're SSHed into the switch, issuing commands, hardware is forwarding packets without any need to use the CPU. This allows you to do things like upgrade the switch's os without inter- rupting packet flow. Out-of-band management supported On the 5000s, there is a dedicated management interface that, on nonL3 models, is the only port that can be assigned an IP address. The management port is in its own VRF (see the section "Virtual Routing and Forwarding" on page 281 for more detail). Lights-out management on 7000 series Similar to what servers have been doing for years, the Nexus 7000 series has a special port with its own processor that remains on even when the switch is pow- ered off. This Connectivity Management Port (CMP) allows you to control the switch with lights-out capability that is completely independent of NX-OS. High-speed backplane on 7000 series The original fabric modules released for the Nexus 7000-series switches provide up to 230 Gbps per slot with N+1 redundancy. N+1 redundancy on 7000 series N+1 redundancy means that there is an additional module available in case of failure of the primary module. Thus if you require two fabric blades, you can install three, with the third being used for redundancy. Hardware forwarding engines on every I/O module (7000 series) Every module contains distributed forwarding engines that allow the switch to 