The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches comprise a modular data center-class product line designed for highly scalable 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks with a fabric architecture that scales beyond 15 terabits per second (Tbps). Designed to meet the requirements of the most mission-critical data centers, it delivers continuous system operation and virtualized, pervasive services. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series is based on a proven operating system, with enhanced features to deliver real-time system upgrades with exceptional manageability and serviceability. Its innovative design is purpose built to support end-to-end data center connectivity, consolidating IP, storage, and interprocess communication (IPC) networks onto a single Ethernet fabric.The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Supervisor Module is designed to deliver scalable control plane and management functions for the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series chassis. It is based on a dual core processor that scales the control plane by harnessing the flexibility and power of the dual cores. The supervisors control the Layer 2 and 3 services, redundancy capabilities, configuration management, status monitoring, power and environmental management, and more. It provides centralized arbitration to the system fabric for all line cards. The fully distributed forwarding architecture allows the supervisor to support transparent upgrades to higher forwarding capacity-capable I/O and fabric modules. The supervisor incorporates an innovative dedicated connectivity management processor (CMP) to support remote management and troubleshooting of the complete system. Two supervisors are required for a fully redundant system, with one supervisor module running as the active device and the other in hot standby mode, providing exceptional high-availability features in data center-class products.