●      Hardware ready to support up to 25.6 Tbps in wired switching capacity, with up to 6.4 Tbps bandwidth per slot.

●      Up to 9.6 Tbps in wired switching capacity, with 3 Bpps of forwarding performance with the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 1.

●      Up to 48 nonblocking 100 Gigabit Ethernet QSPF28 ports with the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 1.

●      Up to 96 nonblocking 40 Gigabit Ethernet QSFP+ ports with the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 1.

●      Up to 192 nonblocking 25 Gigabit Ethernet /10 Gigabit Ethernet SFP28/SFP+ ports with the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 1.

●      Up to 192 non blocking 10 Gigabit Ethernet / 5 Gigabit Ethernet / 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet / 1 Gigabit Ethernet / 100 Megabit / 10 Megabit RJ45 copper ports with the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 1.

●      Platinum-rated AC and DC power supplies.

Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 1 and Line Cards

●      The UADP* 3.0 Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) is future-ready for next-generation technologies, with a programmable pipeline, microengine capabilities, and template-based configurable allocation of Layer 2, Layer 3, forwarding, ACL, and Quality-of-Service (QoS) entries.

●      It is the first ASIC to support double-width HW tables. This provides equivalent table size and processing performance for IPv4 and IPv6.

●      The Supervisor Engine 1, with a 2.0-GHz Intel^® x86 CPU with 8 cores, provides up to 960 GB of SATA SSD local storage for container-based application hosting.

●      Up to 108 MB of buffer (36 MB of unified buffer per ASIC).

●      Line-rate, hardware-based Flexible NetFlow (FNF) delivers flow collection for up to 294,000 flows.

●      IPv6 support in hardware provides wire-rate forwarding for IPv6 networks.

●      Dual-stack support for IPv4 and IPv6 and dynamic hardware forwarding table allocations enable easy IPv4-to-IPv6 migration.

●      Flexible routing (IPv4, IPv6, and multicast) tables, Layer 2 tables, ACL tables, and QoS tables.
 

Cisco IOS XE Software opens a completely new paradigm in network configuration, operation, and monitoring through network automation. Cisco’s automation solution is open, standards-based, and extensible across the entire lifecycle of a network device. The various automation mechanisms are outlined below.

●      Automated Device Provisioning is the ability to automate the process of upgrading software images and installing configuration files on Cisco Catalyst switches when they are being deployed in the network for the first time. Cisco provides turnkey solutions such as Plug and Play and Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) that enable an effortless and automated deployment.

●      API-driven configuration is available with modern network switches such as Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series switches. It supports a wide range of automation features and provides robust open APIs over NETCONF and RESTCONF using YANG data models for external tools, both off the shelf and custom built, to automatically provision network resources.

●      Granular visibility enables model-driven telemetry to stream data from a switch to a destination. The data to be streamed is identified through subscription to a data set in a YANG model. The subscribed data set is streamed to the destination at specified intervals. Additionally, Cisco IOS XE enables the push model. It provides near-real-time monitoring of the network, leading to quick detection and rectification of failures.

●      Seamless software upgrades and patching supports OS resilience. On Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series switches Cisco IOS XE supports hot patching without reboot, which provides fixes for critical bugs and security vulnerabilities between regular maintenance releases. This support lets you add patches without having to wait for the next maintenance release.

●      Trustworthy solutions built with Cisco Trust Anchor Technologies provide a highly secure foundation for Cisco products. With Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series switches, these technologies enable hardware and software authenticity assurance for supply chain trust and strong mitigation against man-in-the-middle attacks that compromise software and firmware. Trust Anchor capabilities include image signing, Secure Boot, and Cisco Trust Anchor module.

●      High Availability: Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series switches support high-availability features, including
the following:

◦    Multichassis EtherChannel can be configured across StackWise-Virtual members for high resiliency.

◦    IEEE 802.1s Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol (MSTP) provides rapid spanning tree convergence independent of spanning tree timers and also offers the benefit of Layer 2 load balancing and distributed processing.

◦    Per-VLAN Rapid Spanning Tree (PVRST+) allows rapid spanning tree (IEEE 802.1w) reconvergence on a per-VLAN spanning tree basis, providing simpler configuration than MSTP. In both MSTP and PVRST+ modes, stacked units behave as a single spanning tree node.

◦    Switch-port auto-recovery (“err-disable” recovery) automatically attempts to reactivate a link that is disabled because of a network error.

◦    Cisco^® Catalyst^® 9600 platform StackWise^® Virtual technology allows the clustering of two physical switches together into a single logical entity. The two switches operate as one; they share the same configuration and forwarding state. This technology allows for enhancements in all areas of network design, including high availability, scalability, management, and maintenance.

◦    Cisco^® Catalyst^® 9600 platform StackWise^® Virtual Quad-Sup Route Processor Redundancy (RPR) mode that improves quad-sup functionality and failover behavior in case of supervisor failure which allows automatic failover between all supervisors in case of the failure.