[c-nsp] Cat6500 modular IOS - direction?

[Mack McBride]

The rumors are that the new supervisor will work with both 40G and 80G cards but only in E chassis line.
Again rumors are that it will support both 40G and 80G simultaneously.
The 6500 is being re-positioned as a services chassis and some older line cards will not be supported.
Meaning anything not gig-e capable or higher and no bus cards (all are EOL anyway).

80G would have to be earl8 based, since the earl7 does not have the throughput.
There is also talk of a newer code train but don't expect it to throw away the SX/SR code base.
Even the ASR 1006 is mostly command compatible although there are obvious hardware differences.

LR Mack McBride
Network Architect

-----Original Message-----
From: cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net [mailto:cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Nick Hilliard
Sent: Friday, August 27, 2010 7:24 PM
To: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Cat6500 modular IOS - direction?

On 27/08/2010 21:59, Gert Doering wrote:
> "The Rumors" seem to suggest that "The New Supervisor" (does it have
> management commitment yet?), if it shows up, is incompatible with existing
> line cards, runs a completely different software than "The Old Supervisor",
> and mainly shares the chassis and power supplies with the 6500 line.

The rumours that I've seen floating around in public places (based on
easily googled cisco docs) indicate that the sup2t will be earl8 based,
will support 80G per slot and will have a new range of 80G line cards but
will also run 40G line cards (although it's not clear whether running mixed
40G/80g line cards will pull the entire chassis down to 40G), that it has
enough fib tcam for 1m ipv4 entries, that it will support 512k netflow
entries, and that it will be 65k only.  These are slightly older rumours,
so things may have changed recently.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it had a different software image,
just like the rsp720 does (ppc vs mips), but would be surprised if Cisco
kept it on its own software train.

I'm inclined to believe Cisco when they say that they will maintain the 65k
chassis for years to come.  It's a massive cash-cow for them, and one
doesn't throw away a money printing device like that just because it has
last year's colours on it.

On the other hand, it is disappointing that the sup2t has taken so long to
materialise.

Nick
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