Product overview

Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Chassis

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

●      25.6 Tbps wired switching capacity unleashed with Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 2. Up to 9.6 Tbps in wired switching capacity, with 3 Bpps of forwarding performance with the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 1.

●      Capacity of upto 32 ports of 400G Gigabit Ethernet QSFP-DD ports with the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 2. Upto 8 non-blocking 400 Gigabit Ethernet QSFP-DD ports supported with current generation Line Cards.

●      Up to 48 nonblocking 100 Gigabit Ethernet QSPF28 ports with the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 1, and upto 128 nonblocking 100 Gigabit Ethernet QSPF28 ports with the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 2

●      Upto 128 nonblocking 40 Gigabit Ethernet QSPF28 ports with the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 2 and up to 96 nonblocking 40 Gigabit Ethernet QSFP+ ports with the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 1.

●      Up to 256 nonblocking 50G/25G/10G Gigabit Ethernet QSPF56 ports with the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 2 and upto 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 10G multigigabit (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 Supervisor Engine 2 only supports speeds at and above 10 GBps.

●      Platinum-rated AC and DC power supplies.

Figure 1.           

Cisco Catalyst 9606R Chassis

Cisco IOS XE

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.

Platform benefits

Table 1.        Platform benefits of the Cisco Catalyst 9600 and 9600X

¹ C9600X models: minimum IOSXE software release 17.8.1

² C9600X models: feature is not available at FCS, but will be available in future software releases

Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Chassis

Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series switches offers one chassis option and multiple line-card options (Table 1). It provides a common architecture that can scale up to 192 10 Gigabit or 25 Gigabit Ethernet ports. The Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series redundant chassis offer High Availability (HA) by supporting 1 + 1 redundant supervisor engines with full-image In-Service Software Upgrades (ISSU). NSF/SSO and ISSU help ensure continuous packet forwarding during supervisor engine switchover to enable HA for business-critical applications.

The Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series chassis is enterprise optimized, with efficient side-to-side airflow and full front accessibility for all removable components, including supervisors, line cards, power supplies, and fan tray. The chassis also supports optional rear accessibility for the fan tray to enable efficient cable management. The Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series chassis, supervisor, line cards, power supply, and fan tray have embedded RFID tags that facilitate easy asset and inventory management using commercial RFID readers.

Table 2.        Chassis Features

¹Fully loaded C9606R chassis, Minimum 3 power supplies required if input voltage is 110V

Supervisor configuration

Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series switches offers an industry-leading supervisor engine built for secure networks, IoT applications, next-generation mobility, and cloud adoption. Supervisor Engine 1 is built with the latest UADP ASIC, with its programmable pipeline and template-based, configurable allocation of Layer 2, Layer 3, forwarding, ACLs and QoS entries, making it ready for next-generation technologies.

Table 3 lists the maximum bandwidth per slot.

Table 3.        Supervisor Engine 1 maximum bandwidth per slot

Table 4 lists the minimum software requirements for the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 1.

Table 4.        Supervisor Engine 1 minimum software requirements

Line Card Options

Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series switches offers the ability to mix and match a range of line cards to support numerous cores and aggregation deployments. Supported line cards are listed in Table 5 and 6 by part number.

Table 5.        Line Cards compatible with Catalyst 9600 Supervisor Engine 1

^*Supported from IOX XE 16.12.2

Table 6.        Line Cards compatible with Catalyst 9600 Supervisor Engine 2

Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series switches has flexible interface types and port densities that allow you to mix and match network configurations to meet the specific needs of campus networks (Table 7).

Table 7.        Maximum Chassis Port Densities

^**Using C9600-LC-48TX

¹With Breakouts