Cisco to juice 6500 switch, report says

A Wall Street analyst firm report says that Cisco is readying a Catalyst 6500 switch upgrade that will double bandwidth on the device, offering customers greater support for 10G Ethernet LANs.

The company is likely to launch a new switch backplane in 2006 called the Supervisor 1440 module for the Catalyst 6500, according to several reports issued recently by UBS Investment Bank. The module is expected to support 1.4T bit/sec of bandwidth to the switch, doubling the capacity of the previous Supervisor 720 module. The Supervisor Module on a Cisco Catalyst 6500 switch provides the switching fabric for the entire chassis, moving traffic across ports on different line cards inside the switch.

UBS last week reported that the Cisco would launch the new Supervisor blade by year-end. Cisco declined to comment on UBS’s report at the time. But a Cisco spokesman this week said that the report was “purely speculating when [Cisco is] going to introduce a new [Supervisor module] for the Catalyst 6500 based on when we launched the Supervisor 720.”

"Cisco has not done an update for almost two years," says Long Jiang, a UBS Warburg analyst. "And now that they are doing it, it's going to make them more competitive. All vendors will feel some increased pressure from Cisco."

The Supervisor 1440 would be the first major upgrade to the backplane of the Catalyst 6500 since the Supervisor 720 module was introduced in 2003.

Cisco has packed all kinds of services into the Catalyst 6500 over the years, with support ranging from VPN concentration, firewall, intrusion-detection systems, wireless LAN management, content switching and, most recently, XML traffic acceleration. But Cisco has been playing catch-up for years in terms of pure high-end switching capacity. Rivals Extreme, Force10 and Foundry have had terabit switches for more than a year.

"Cisco narrows the [performance] gap vs. the competition, but it's not a leapfrog," Jiang says. The Supervisor 1440 will still come up short in terms of total switching capacity compared with Extreme's BlackDiamond 10K, Foundry's BigIron and Force10's E1200 switch.

However, any lag in raw horsepower has not affected Cisco's position in the market. The Catalyst 6500 still dominates rival products, with Cisco grabbing more than 70% market share in modular Layer 3 switching and 10G Ethernet switching revenue last year, according to InStat. The Catalyst 6500 brought in about $6.7 billion in revenue in the calendar year 2004, the research firm says.Catalyst products accounted for 40% of its fourth-quarter revenue for fiscal 2005, which ends this month.

Users can expect that the introduction of the new module will coincide with new high-density Gigabit and 10G Ethernet modules, which can take advantage of the larger switch backplane, analysts say. The most 10G ports Cisco can fit onto a Catalyst 6500 blade is four. Extreme and Foundry blades support up to six and eight 10G ports, respectively.

One selling point for the Catalyst 6500 is the ability to upgrade modules without replacing the switch chassis. But six years after the platform was introduced, some analysts say the switch is getting long in the tooth. Sources say that Cisco is currently working on the successor to the Catalyst 6500 line, said to have the code name "Constellation 3." Sources say the new switch will incorporate Ethernet as well as Fiber Channel technologies, merging some of the roles of the MDS 9000 storage switch and Catalyst 6500 LAN into a single data center platform.