The Cisco Nexus 9300 Series Switches include both spine and leaf switches. The Cisco Nexus 9336PQ ACI Spine Switch is a 2-rack-unit (2RU) spine switch for Cisco ACI that supports 1.44 Tbps of bandwidth across 36 fixed 40 QSFP+ ports. The rest of the Cisco Nexus 9300 platform is composed of fixed-port leaf switches. Cisco Nexus 9300 platform leaf switches are Layer 2 and 3 nonblocking 10 and 40 Gigabit Eth The Cisco Nexus 9336PQ Switch is designed for a spine role only. The Nexus 9336PQ spine switch along with Nexus 9300 leaf nodes enable an automated and policy driven ACI architecture. The Cisco Nexus 9336 PQ offers advanced scalability in the smallest spine switch form factor, and enables connectivity to up-to 36 Cisco Nexus 9300 leaf switches with its high port density of 36 40 GbE ports and 1.44 Tbps throughput. The degree of redundancy in leaf-and-spine architectures delivers increased availability with a high level of flexibility in workload placement. ernet switches with up to 1.28 terabits per second (Tbps) of internal bandwidth.