Architectures With Bus‐Based Switch Fabrics: Case Study—Cisco Catalyst 6000 Series Switches

The Cisco Catalyst 6000 family of switch/routers consists of the Catalyst 6000 and 6500 Series that are designed to deliver high‐speed Layer 2 and 3 forwarding solutions for service provider and enterprise networks. This chapter describes the different Catalyst 6000 series switch/router architectures. It highlights the main architectural features of the Catalyst 6000 series of switch/routers. The Catalyst 6000 Series supports two versions of the Supervisor Engine ‐ Supervisor Engine 1A and Supervisor Engine 2. The Catalyst 6000 and 6500 employ two types of port ASICs for network connectivity: PINNACLE ASIC and COIL ASIC. These port ASICs provide connectivity from a network to the 32 Gb/s main shared switching bus or the 16 Gb/s local bus supported on the fabric‐enabled and fabriconly line cards. The chapter describes the flow of packets through the Catalyst 6000 and a centralized flow cache maintained by the Supervisor Engine 1A.