Cisco WS-C3550-12G Switch Guide - Page 110

Modular Switches: Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Spotlight The key enabler of a VSS Virtual Switching Supervisor 720-10G and Supervisor 2T. Any two Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches with thiese supervisor engines can be pooled together into a VSS system. The two switches are connected with 10 GBE links called Virtual Switch Links (VSLs). Once a VSS is created it acts as a single virtual Cisco Catalyst 6500 switch delivering the following benefits: Operational Manageability: Two Catalyst 6500s shares a single point of management, single gateway IP address, and single routing instance-eliminating the dependence on First Hop Redundancy Protocols (FHRP) and Spanning Tree Protocol. Non-Stop Communications: Delivers deterministic, sub-200 millisecond Layer 2 link recovery through inter-chassis stateful failovers and the predictable resilience of Etherchannel. Scales to 4.0Tbps: Scales system bandwidth capacity to 4.0 Tbps by activating all available bandwidth across redundant Catalyst 6500 switches. PoE Scalability The Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series provides industry leading levels of power scalability (up to 420 Class 3 devices) needed to support high-density PoE deployments. It also offers Enhanced Power over Ethernet (ePoE) for devices that require more than 30 Watts per port. The enhanced 6- and 9-slot chassis (WS-C6506-E and WS-C6509-E models) are designed to scale beyond the current 8700W power supplies. Continuing this product line's tradition of unmatched investment protection, all existing supervisors, line cards, switch fabrics, and software releases are supported in the E series chassis. 1See Virtual Switching System 1440 on the Catalyst 6500 Series White Paper for complete requirements. 2Per EOS announcement, last day to order is September 8, 2010. 3Subsystem ISSU aka Patching has been deprecated starting 12.2(33)SXI3. 108