Unparalleled refresh of the Catalyst 6500 delivers IPv6 and NetFlow ‘industry firsts,’ can triple performance, quadruple scalability, and provide potential investment 
protection for another decade
Today at Cisco Live, the company’s annual IT and communications conference, Cisco introduced the infusion of multiple innovations into its flagship Catalyst® 6500 Series Switches, the most widely deployed network switches on earth. These innovations provide Catalyst 6500 customers with the capability to evolve their network infrastructure for the coming decade’s proliferation of connected devices, growth of video traffic, cloud computing business models and increasingly mobile workforces—without requiring “rip and replace” upgrades.
Awarded more than 500 patents, the Catalyst 6500 has been the de facto industry standard switching platform at the heart of the world’s campus, data center, WAN, and Metro Ethernet networks since its introduction in 1999 and has a $42 billion installed base, nearly 700,000 systems/110 million ports deployed and more than 25,000 customers worldwide. For years the platform has set the bar for product leadership, deployment scale and new innovation in the networking industry.
Supporting Quote:
John McCool, senior vice president, Cisco
“By closely working with our massive customer base, Cisco is able to focus our innovation on real-world requirements. This is why the Catalyst platform spurred the spread of the Internet on campus networks worldwide and is now enabling these same networks to evolve to 10 gigabits and 40 gigabits while taking advantage of a full range of network services in the campus and the data center—no ‘rip and replace’ required. The relationship between installed base knowledge, innovation and business value results in greater competitive differentiation and industry leadership for Cisco, its customers and partners.”
Additional Key Highlights & Industry Firsts
At the heart of the makeover is the introduction of the highly anticipated Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Supervisor Engine 2T, a 2-terabit card that unlocks 80 gigabits per second per slot, new feature-rich 10-gigabit and 10-Gigabit Ethernet line cards, and next-generation borderless services that provide customers with new mobility, security, network analysis and load balancing capabilities.
The new supervisor engine can increase the throughput capability of the Catalyst 6500 from 720 Gbps to 2 Tbps, a threefold increase. It can also quadruple the number of devices or users that can connect to a network. For example, a single Catalyst 6500 can now support up to 10,000 mobile devices.
More than 200 new technical features have been added to Cisco IOS® Software to meet growing security, mobility, application, voice/video, and virtualization demands.
Next-generation service modules.New L4-7 mobility, security, network analysis and load balancing service modules allow customers to reduce the number of L4-7 devices in their network they need to manage, improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon footprint.
Technology to ease the IPv6 transition.The Catalyst 6500 is also the first platform to offer IPv6 First Hop Security features (such as device tracking, Neighbor Discovery Protocol Inspection, and IPv6 per-port address limits) so customers can continue to grow their networks with a high assurance of security as they transition from IPv4 to IPv6.
First native support for technologies that simplify the LAN/WAN boundary for service providers and customers.These technologies, called Virtual Private LAN Services support and Bridged Domain Technology, enable rapid and flexible service provisioning, because the service bandwidth is not tied to the physical interface. Native support can substantially reduce the cost while radically improving performance for this proven, standardized technology.
First platform to offer system-comprehensive and multiprotocol NetFlow.To assist customers as they seek to increase the accuracy of capacity planning and resource allocation, Cisco has added support for Flexible and Sampled NetFlow for enhanced and granular monitoring of IPv4, IPv6, multicast and MPLS traffic
Enhancements to ensure superior video experience. While the “multicast” technique for one-to-many communication over an IP infrastructure has become increasingly important for market-data feeds and video broadcasts, multicast route scalability has been a persistent issue. To address this, the Cisco Supervisor Engine 2T provides up to a 16-fold increase in multicast route scalability. It also delivers major improvements to the way the Catalyst 6500 selectively forwards multicast traffic to only the links that have solicited them. Called IGMPv3 and MLDv2 Snooping, these enhancements help ensure that multicasting does not cause an unnecessary load on the host device, and they are especially useful for bandwidth-intensive IP multicast applications such as IPTV.
