Meeting the Family
The Catalyst 6000 family consists of the six-slot Catalyst 6006 and 6506, and the nine-slot 6009 and 6509. All share the same media modules and supervisor control boards. In the future, the 6500 will support a 128-Gbps (256-Gbps full duplex) crossbar switching fabric, and high-performance line cards. Today, the switches' architecture is like that of the Catalyst 5000, but instead of three 1.2-Gbps buses, one 16-Gbps (32-Gbps full duplex) bus connects all the line cards.

The Catalyst 6000 family is Cisco's mid- to high-range aggregation device. Cisco's other enterprise solutions include the high-end Catalyst 8500 family of backbone Layer 3 switching routers, and the Catalyst 5000. The price per port of the Catalyst 6000 falls in between that of the 8500 and the 5000.

For current Cisco customers, the 6500 can aggregate connections previously aggregated by the Catalyst 5000. This upgrade path lets you push your 5000 series switches to the edge of the network while significantly upgrading the performance and capacity of your IDFs (Intermediate Distribution Frames). The 6500 uses a route-cache model, more akin to most Layer 3 switches, that can hold 128,000 entries.

The MSFC is a two-part daughtercard for the Catalyst 6000 Supervisor module. The first part is called the PFC, or Policy Feature Card, which enables the Layer 2/3/4 QoS, access-control and security features. The other part is a routing module for the supervisor engine, akin to a Cisco 7200 router, with software-routing performance of about 200,000 packets per second. Combined with the PFC module, the IP and IPX performance of the routing module climbs to 15 million packets per second. Customers using Catalyst 6000s in the wiring closet can add the PFC module without the routing module, enabling all the Layer 2/3/4 access-control and policy features without the 15 million pps routing.

The Catalyst 6x09 family holds nine modules. One slot must be used for the supervisor engine, and a second can be used for a redundant supervisor module. You can install up to 130 Gigabit Ethernet ports or 384 ports of 10/100 RJ-45 Fast Ethernet in a single chassis; the Catalyst 6x09 is one of the largest switches I've tested (only Fore Systems' ESX-4800 can match its 384-port Fast Ethernet count). Up to 192 ports of MT-RJ-based 10BASE-FL or 100BASE-FX also can be installed.

I tested the Catalyst 6509's performance, QoS and security features with the MSFC installed. I verified full Layer 3 wire speed throughput of 10 ports of Gigabit Ethernet and 96 ports of Fast Ethernet. The Catalyst 6509 forwarded wire rate IP at packet sizes of 64,576 and 1,518 bytes without dropping a packet. The 6500's performance sizzles; I measured a top rate of 14,880,095 packets per second, using Netcom Systems' Smartbits to benchmark 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces between two Catalyst 6500 Gigabit Ethernet modules.

The PFC portion lets the Catalyst 6000s do wire-speed access control, packet classification for QoS and security filtering. I tested them all using Netcom Systems' SmartFlow. I verified the Catalyst 6509's ability to classify traffic based on UDP or TCP source or destination Layer 4 addresses. The benchmark revealed that the Catalyst 6509 could classify and prioritize simultaneously on 96 Fast Ethernet interfaces at wire speed.

The Catalyst 6509 has two queues per port to handle prioritized traffic. The queues are serviced by a weighted round-robin algorithm. Inside each queue, the Catalyst 6509 can apply a WRED (Weighted Random Early Discard) algorithm, which allows the network administrator to define certain watershed marks. When the queues on the switch fill beyond these levels, the WRED algorithm begins randomly discarding packets from the loaded queues based on IP ToS weights.

Besides classifying packets based on Layer 4 addresses, the Cisco 6500 series can filter packets using the same access-control mechanism. I tested the 6509's ability to classify and filter at wire speed--it dropped less than 1/100th of 1 percent of traffic.

The 6509 supports all of the latest standards-based methods for Ethernet and IP internetworking, including 802.1p and 802.1Q for prioritization and VLANs, as well as a Differentiated Services model for IP quality of service. In addition to its Layer 3/Layer 4 capabilities, the MSFC lets you apply Layer 3/Layer 4 QoS to a non-routed environment. Traditionally, when IP ToS information is assigned to an IP packet, it has no effect until the packet crosses a router boundary. But with Cisco's solution, Layer 3 IP ToS information is honored by the switch even in a switched environment. Extreme Networks is the only other vendor I am aware of that offers this functionality. The 6000 family is ready for the next generation of policy-aware networks, supporting COPS (Common Open Policy Server) and RSVP+ (Resource Reservation Protocol) for policy distribution and bandwidth management.

Customers familiar with the Catalyst 5000 and IOS OSes will love the 6500 interface. The 6000 family runs under CatOS, while the MSFC router operates under IOS. An integrated IOS console management solution is in the works. The Catalyst 6509 is priced similarly to industry price leaders. In high-density configurations, prices approach $375 per 10/100 port and $1,200 per gigabit port.

Send your comments on this article to Joel Conover at jconover@nwc.com.