Cisco
introduced the infusion of multiple innovations into its flagship Catalyst 6500
Series Switches.
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.
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. The Catalyst 6500 led the industry’s
port transition first from Fast Ethernet speeds to Gigabit Ethernet and then to
10 Gigabit Ethernet.
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.
All
new line cards and the 2 Tbps supervisor are compatible with all Cisco E-Series
chassis models, offering minimal intervention to the existing Catalyst 6500
E-Series infrastructure. This compatibility prevents rip-and-replace upgrades
that jeopardize a customer’s network uptime and require additional personnel,
expenses and time.
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.
“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,” said John McCool, senior vice
president, Cisco.
The
core of the network may not always get the limelight, but it makes or breaks
the performance of the applications our faculty, students, and researchers
depend upon daily. We see more connected devices and bandwidth-hungry
applications coming online every year, placing greater demands on our network,”
said Ed Wilson, network test
engineer/system design specialist, Pennsylvania State University.
We
already have more than 20 Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches in the core of our
network, connecting hundreds of departments and tens of thousands of faculty
and students. The introduction of the Catalyst 6500 Supervisor Engine 2T will
extend our investment in Cisco systems with impressive scalability and
three-fold performance gains so we can better manage increased demands from
users wanting higher-bandwidth services and greater mobility,” Wilson added.
By
TelecomLead.com Team
[email protected]
