This paper provides insight into the architecture of the Cisco Catalyst 6500 family, including supervisor engines, line cards, chassis, and other components. The Catalyst 6500 series is a modular chassis family that supports a range of line-card options and delivers high performance up to 400Mpps, making it one of the highest performing switch products in the market. The chassis options range from 3 to 13 slots and support redundant supervisor engines and power supplies. The series is NEBS L3 compliant.
The Cisco Catalyst 6500 is a modular chassis family that supports a range of line‑card options and chassis sizes from three to thirteen slots. It provides a 32‑Gbps shared switching bus and, with newer supervisor engines, a cross‑bar fabric up to 720 Gbps, enabling distributed forwarding rates up to 400 Mpps.
The document details the two generations of fans, the variety of AC and DC power supplies, and the different supervisor engine families (32, 720, 720‑3B, 720‑3BXL) along with their processing resources, feature cards, and supported high‑speed interfaces.
| Shared switching bus capacity | 32 Gbps |
|---|---|
| Maximum distributed forwarding rate | 400 Mpps |
| 2500 W AC power supply output (220 VAC) | 2500 W |