[c-nsp] New Catalyst 6k chassis

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Sun, 9 Jun 2013, Rinse Kloek wrote:

> Can someone confirm rumors about the new Catalyst 6k chassis ?
> The new Catalyst 6807-XL chassis will be able to scale up to 220-880Gbps per 
> slot with feature linecards/sup. The chassis will be compatible with the 
> current SUP2T supervisor.
>
> Also reading there will be a fixed chassis version of the 6500 (like the 
> 4500-x) with a larger FIB (2M routes) and supporting high density 1/10G SFP+ 
> line cards.

Your best bet might be to talk to your account team.  Sometimes Cisco will 
inform certain customers of new products and features on the horizon, but 
typically with some sort of non-disclosure agreement in place.

I don't know if such a switch is on the horizon, and that's certainly 
possible, but it would seem odd to me at first glance.  Cisco wants to 
push people to the Nexus product line.  Announcing a new backplane that's 
compatible with at least some of the 6500 hardware and offers many of the 
same features as the Nexus 7K would seem to cannibalize a good portion of 
the customer base that Cisco wants to migrate to the Nexus.  Of course, 
this could be one of those inter-business-unit 6500-vs-7600-style pissing 
contests...

If Cisco does do this, I would expect such a switch to start moving toward 
a more Nexus-like licensing model, where you have to license specific groups
of features.  How feasible that would be, while maintaining backward 
compatibility with the Sup2T and some subset of the existing linecards 
remains to be seen.

jms