Buying the right Chassis and Card that fit your needs: Cisco 6500 and SUP

We sell a lot of 6500 and 6500-E, as well as their supervisor engines, and often times clients will purchase simply because of the lower upfront cost. However, as networking and bandwidth requirement will only grow larger, it may be wise to absorb the larger upfront cost and enjoy the lower overhead that follows when in need of maintenance and upgrade.

First, let’s discuss the original 6500 and the newer 6500-E chassis. The first big difference is of course their age, the 6500 is considered an EOS/EOL equipment which means clients will no longer be able to get Cisco’s SmartNet services for them, and obtaining support for them from Cisco is almost impossible. And most of the time, the client will have to whole new Chassis if something goes wrong. The 6500-E on the other hand, can still be purchased with SmartNet. The second difference is that the 6500-E has a larger power ceiling to accommodate a full line of PoE Line cards. Although the 6500 can support the newer higher spec power supplies, PSUs higher than 4000W are limited to 4000W. So if you need to accommodate a lot of PoE devices, you’ll definitely need 6500-E Chassis.

Here is a quick comparison chart between our most popular Cisco Catalyst 6500 models showing the maximum support PoE devices.

Power Supply Catalyst 6506 Catalyst 6506-E Catalyst 6509 Catalyst 6509-E
4000W 184 184 184 184
6000W 184 282 184 279
9000W 184 310 184 434

Next, we’ll discuss a little about the two most popular SUPs that we offer: the SUP32 and the SUP720. The fundamental difference is basically that SUP32 offers a 32 Gbps shared bus for the entire chassis, where as the SUP720 offers 720 Gbps bandwidth in a star configuration. In addition to the big difference in bandwidth, the traffic delivery method differs between the two. Here is a cool illustration by one of our network engineers.

The star is much more efficient and consistent then driving along the bus route waiting for the bus to finally make your destination, as he stops at every stop to pick up passengers or drop them off.

Basically, the bus method is akin to the old network where many devices share a single line in a collision domain; whereas in the star, each device is given its own collision domain.

With the growing amount of traffic everyday, it is very important for you to make sure that your devices are up to task, and that the cost of ownership is more than just the upfront cost.