Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series

The Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switch is a modular system that can grow as customer requirements expand and technology evolves, allowing businesses to upgrade and reconfigure systems by adding new modules, replacing existing modules, and adding and redeploying systems. Expand your deployment options and broaden the value of your Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switch by installing the following interface cards or service modules:

Cisco 6500 Series Chassis

The Cisco Catalyst 6500 is a modular chassis family supporting a range of line-card options for all customer network deployments. Its performance scales up to 400Mpps, providing one of the highest performing switch products on the market today. It supports a range of chassis options delivering from 3 to 13 slots. All chassis support redundant supervisor engines as well as redundant power supplies. The chassis options are shown in Figure 1.

Cisco 1-Port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Shared Port Adapter

The Cisco® Interface Flexibility (I-Flex) design combines shared port adapters (SPAs) and SPA interface processors (SIPs), taking advantage of an extensible design that facilitates service prioritization for voice, video, and data services. Enterprise and service provider customers can take advantage of improved slot economics resulting from modular port adapters that are interchangeable across Cisco Systems® routing platforms. The Cisco I-Flex design maximizes connectivity options and offers superior service intelligence through programmable interface processors that deliver line-rate performance. Cisco I-Flex enhances speed-to-service revenue and provides a rich set of quality-of-service (QoS) features for premium service delivery while effectively reducing the overall cost of ownership. This data sheet contains the specifications for the Cisco 1-Port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Shared Port Adapter, Version 2 (Cisco 1-Port 10-GE SPA; Figure 1 shows a SIP with 10 Gigabit Small Form-Factor Pluggable [XFP] optics).

Supervisors and Distributed Forwarding Cards

The Catalyst 6500 Distributed Forwarding Card is installed in DFC-enabled line-card modules that perform distributed forwarding supported by the Catalyst 6500 Supervisor Engine 2 as a field upgrade. These line cards include the WS-X6516-GBIC and the WS-X6816-GBIC.

• When the Distributed Forwarding Card is installed, Line cards that are DFC-enabled make forwarding decisions locally, leaving the supervisor engine free to perform routing and management functions
• The Distributed Forwarding Card supports Cisco’s distributed Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF)-based forwarding architecture
• The Distributed Forwarding Card replicates Layer 2 and 3 forwarding logic in hardware as well as a bus on each line card

Ethernet Modules

The Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series has an 8-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet module and a 4-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet module. These modules support pluggable optics to support distances up to 80km over single-mode fiber, 300m over multimode fiber, and 15m over copper. The 8-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet module provides up to 64 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a single Catalyst 6500 chassis, ideal for deployment in the aggregation layer of LAN campus and data centers. Both modules are interoperable with the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Supervisor Engine 720 and provide 40 Gbps connection to the switch fabric. Building upon the award-winning Catalyst 6500 Series, these 10 Gigabit Ethernet modules are backward compatible with all existing Catalyst 6500 line cards and services modules, enabling service providers and enterprises to offer new Layer 2 through 7 services and network capabilities to increase revenue and user productivity without complete equipment upgrades.

Advanced Integrated Services Modules

The Catalyst 6500 Series offers a wide range of integrated service modules on a single networking platform. These service modules add Layer 4–7 functionality to the existing Layer 2–3 capabilities of the switch, transforming the Catalyst 6500 Series into a fully functional Layer 2–7 device. The integrated service modules use the high-speed switching backplane and intelligent networking capabilities to:

• Provide local, remote, and wireless users with transparent access to resources
• Optimize capacity and bandwidth to manage multiple advanced bandwidth-intensive applications without service degradation
• Protect the network against threats at all levels Deliver network- and application-level services on every port

Cisco continues to develop new integrated service modules to respond to customer needs and technology advancements. Table 1 lists some of the most popular current service modules for the Catalyst 6500 Series Switch.