The increasing number of applications requiring higher bandwidths and the availability of less expensive 10-Gbps servers are combining to drive a growing demand for dense 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet switches. At the same time, data center architecture is evolving in response to new demands on the IT infrastructure. Application workloads are being deployed across a mix of virtualized and nonvirtualized server and storage infrastructure, requiring a network infrastructure that provides consistent connectivity, security, and visibility across a range of bare-metal, virtualized, and cloud computing environments. The Cisco Nexus® 5600 platform Gigabit Ethernet switches are the third generation of the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches: the leading data center server access switches. The Cisco Nexus 5600 platform, the successor to the widely adopted Cisco Nexus 5500 platform switches, maintains all the existing Cisco Nexus 5500 platform features including LAN and SAN convergence (unified ports, Fibre Channel over Ethernet [FCoE], fabric extenders (FEX), and Cisco® FabricPath. In addition, the Cisco Nexus 5600 platform offers integrated line-rate Layer 2 and 3 with true 40 Gigabit Ethernet support, the Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA) innovation, Network Virtualization Using Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE), VXLAN bridging and routing capabilities, excellent network programmability and visibility, deep buffers, and significantly higher scale and performance for highly virtualized, automated, and cloud environments.