Cisco announces a replacement for the venerable Catalyst 6500 campus switches-- The Catalyst 9600, a modular core switch designed to handle the demands of Wifi 6, mGig speeds and security.
The Catalyst 9600 brings features from the best-selling Catalyst 6500, such as support for MPLS, virtual switching and IPv6, while adding intent-based networking (IBM), wireless networks and security segmentation, among others. It is essentially a line of purpose-built 40Gb and 100Gb ethernet modular switches aimed at enterprise campuses, with wired switching capacity reaching up to 25.6Tbp, with up to 6.7Tbps of bandwidth per slot.
The switch supports granular port densities, including nonblocking 40Gb and 100Gb ethernet Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable (QSFP+, QSFP28) and 1, 10, and 25Gb Small Form-Factor Pluggable Plus (SFP, SFP+, SFP28). Using the Cisco Catalyst 9600 series Supervisor Engine 1, customers can configure it to support up to 48 nonblocking 100Gb QSPF28 ports, up to 96 nonblocking 40Gb QSFP+ ports and up to 192 nonblocking 25Gb/10 SFP28/SFP+ ports.
It supports advanced routing and infrastructure services (MPLS, Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNs, Multicast VPN, and Network Address Translation), as well as Cisco Software-Defined Access capabilities such as host-tracking database cross-domain connectivity and VPN Routing and Forwarding (VRF)-aware Locator/ID Separation Protocol, and network system virtualisation with Cisco StackWise virtual technology.
The 9600 series runs on the same Cisco IOS XE software as all Catalyst 9000 products, bringing support for other key products such as Cisco DNA Center. It also provides automated device provisioning and automation features, including support for network configuration protocol NETCONF and RESTCONF using YANG data models. Another addition is hot patching, allowing customers can add patches without need to wait for the next maintenance release.
