Cisco Catalyst 6500 gets Gigabit Ethernet makeover

Cisco last week introduced modules for its Catalyst 6500 enterprise network switch that provide 1G and 10G bit/sec Ethernet ports and new quality-of-service and security features.

Cisco last week introduced modules for its Catalyst 6500 enterprise network switch that provide 1G and 10G bit/sec Ethernet ports and new quality-of-service and security features.

Among the new modules is a blade with 24 small form-factor pluggable Gigabit Ethernet ports, which can be configured for copper or fiber and costs $15,000.

A 48-port blade also now is available that supports 10/100/1000M bit/sec Ethernet on each port and supports Jumbo Frames, which allows Ethernet frames as large as 9K bytes (the IEEE standard is 1.5K bytes). Jumbo Frames can be useful for moving large blocks of data over a LAN, such as for network backup. Like the 24-port blade, it costs $15,000.

A daughtercard, priced at $7,500, will be available next month for both blades, adding features such as IPv4 and IPv6 traffic forwarding, QoS and security policy enforcement. The card lets the modules handle these functions locally, which Cisco says frees up a Catalyst 6500’s central processing module.

Also on the daughtercard is a “Call Home” Event Notification feature, which lets a Catalyst 6500 contact network staff via pager or mobile phone in the event of a system failure or other predetermined network trigger.

Cisco also announced optical ports for its four-port 10G bit/sec Ethernet modules, which were introduced in March and cost $20,000. The optical inserts let users deploy 10G bit/sec Ethernet over multi-mode fiber. They include 850nm 10GBase-SR and 1310nm 10GBase-LX4 inserts, which cost $3,000 and $4,000, respectively. Both are based on the XENPAK design standard for 10G bit/sec Ethernet modular optics. The 10GBase-SR insert can be used to run 10G bit/sec Ethernet over multi-mode fiber up to 200 feet, while the 10GBase-LX4 can stretch 10G links up to 1,000 feet. 

Cisco’s new Gig New offerings for the Catalyst 6500 switch include: • A 24-port Gigabit Ethernet blade that supports copper and fiber. • A 48-port blade with 10/100/1000M bit/sec available on each port. • A daughtercard for adding IPv4 and IPv6 traffic forwarding, QoS and security policy enforcement on the 24- and 48-port blades. • Optical ports for previously available four-port 10G bit/sec Ethernet module.

Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches with 10 Gigabit Ethernet will be going into the new Stata Center at MIT, a computer science and artificial intelligence research lab that will open in next year in Cambridge, Mass.

More than 40 Catalyst 6500s will go into the facility, providing 10/100/1000 ports to users at the LAN edge, and with 10G uplinks to the core. Installing network pipes this fat in the new facility was an easy decision, says Jack Costanza, director of IT for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence laboratories at the university.

“We want to make sure that slow network plumbing won’t be the thing that stops people from conducting cutting-edge research,” he says.