switch

Cisco Catalyst 6500 has been around for almost a decade and has gone through two iterations of switch chassis; the original non-E, and the E Chassis. With growing demands for higher bandwidth in today’s network, the next generation of 6500 chassis, rebranded to 6807-XL, has been released by Cisco to support future linecards with increased throughput (> 80Gbps fabric). This article summarizes what you need to know about this product. 

When it comes to user access environment, Cisco has a compressive list of product portfolio for you to choose from including the well-known Catalyst 2K/3K/4K. That portfolio is about to expand with the introduction of Cisco Catalyst 6880-X. 6880-X is a highly scalable and manageable solution for user access offering up to 1008 (FCS) 10/100/1000 ports within a single management system when working with the Catalyst 6800ia remote linecard, while providing the same feature set as a regular 6500 that you might be longing for. This article summarizes what you need to know about this product.

If you are familiar with Nexus 2K in datacenter, let’s meet its counterpart for wiring closet. Cisco Catalyst 6800ia Instant Access has been introduced to fulfill the need of those that use 6500/6800 switches for user access, especially the 6500 knowing that all the its PoE linecards (61xx,63xx,65xx) have become End-of-Sale (EoS). Here is some critical information that will help you decide if 6800ia is right for your environment.

Virtual Switching System (VSS) is a method to combine two physical switches into one logical switch to achieve physical redundancy, Spanning-Tree blocking elimination, and increased bandwidth. VSS was first available in Cisco 6500 but it has recently been introduced to Cisco 4500 and 4500X. This article provides configuration that will allow you to easily enable VSS on these switches.

If you are looking for Cisco switch to operate in an extreme environment, one of your options might be Cisco Industrial Ethernet 3000 (IE-3000). I have recently had an opportunity to review this product and quickly realized its differences from regular Cisco Catalyst switches. Since this is a switch that not a lot of people may have come across, I am going to provide a quick summary to highlight important characteristic of the switch and clarify switch hardware configuration so you do not have to spend hours going through Cisco documentations. The same information can be found on the datasheet and hardware install guide of the switch.