The Cisco Nexus 7000 M3-Series modules are powered by Cisco Nexus M3-Series switch-on-a-chip (SoC) application-specific integrated circuit (ASICs). The M3-Series SoC is an innovative ASIC designed by Cisco that provides a power-efficient, flexible, high-performance packet engine, making it an excellent choice for building I/O modules that power the network infrastructure for public and private cloud environments. Each I/O module uses multiple M3-Series ASICs, and each M3-Series ASIC powers a set of 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 40 Gigabit Ethernet ports, or 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports, called port groups.

The Cisco Nexus 7000 M3-Series I/O modules provide enhanced security and scalability capabilities such as these:

• MAC Security (MACsec) at wire rate with 128- and 256-bit encryption on all ports at all speeds, supporting both key agreement protocols (Security Association Protocol [SAP] and MACsec Key Agreement [MKA]) in hardware: This feature provides line-rate data confidentiality and data integrity conforming to the IEEE MAC address security standard (IEEE 802.1AE [MACsec]), enabling customers to secure virtual port-channel (vPC) and Cisco Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) data center interconnect links and vPC and Cisco FabricPath links within a data center. It also lets customers securely uplink data centers to either their campus or Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) cores.
• Integrated hardware capability for Cisco TrustSec® security, which enhances security access control lists (SACLs) through hardware support for Cisco metadata headers capable of carrying security-group tags (SGTs): SGTs enable security-group ACLs (SGACLs) to provide hardware-based enforcement of security policies, which eliminates dependency on IP addresses, enhances scalability, and simplifies management.
• High-performance onboard fabric services accelerator (FSA): This feature enables distributed services such as Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) and Cisco NetFlow to operate at scale with high performance.
• Larger IPv4 and IPv6 forwarding tables and ACL tables and more quality-of-service (QoS) entries: The increased sizes provide greater flexibility for various deployment scenarios.
• Virtual device context (VDC) capability: This feature enables users to partition one I/O module into multiple virtual switches. Each port group powered by one M3-Series ASIC can be part of one VDC.