Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor
Engine Data Sheet

 

Introduction

Reimagine, Reinforce, Redefine

Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Switches are purpose-built for resiliency at scale with the industry’s most comprehensive security and allows your business to grow at lowest total operational cost. Built upon the foundation of Catalyst 9000, the Catalyst 9600 Series offers scale and security when always on is a must.

Cisco^® Catalyst^® 9600 Series switches are Cisco’s lead modular enterprise core switching platform and as part of the Catalyst 9000 family, are built to transform your network to handle a hybrid world where the workplace is anywhere, endpoints could be anything, and applications are hosted all over the place.

The Catalyst 9600 Series continues to shape the future with continued innovation that helps you reimagine connections, reinforce security and redefine the experience for your hybrid workforce big and small.

As the industry’s first purpose-built 400, 200, 100, 50 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet line of modular switches targeted for the enterprise campus, Catalyst 9600 Series switches deliver unmatched scale (MAC, route, and Access Control List [ACL]) and buffering for enterprise applications.

The Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series also supports foundational high-availability capabilities such as patching, Cisco Nonstop Forwarding with Stateful Switchover (NSF/SSO), redundant platinum-rated power supplies, and fans.

The foundation of Software-Defined Access

The enterprise network lies at the heart of digital transformation. A network that is open, programmable, integrated, and secure maximizes business agility, allowing new business opportunities to be pursued and captured.

The Cisco Digital Network Architecture (Cisco DNA) with Software-Defined Access (SD-Access) is the network fabric that powers business. Cisco SD-Access is an open and extensible, software-driven architecture that accelerates and simplifies your enterprise network operations. SD-Access enables policy-based automation from edge to cloud with foundational capabilities.

Product overview

Cisco Catalyst 9600X Supervisor Engine 2

The new Catalyst 9600X SUP-2 supervisor is based on Cisco Silicon One Q200 Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), which is purpose built for the next generation core with a programmable pipeline (P4) and is the first network silicon to offer switching capacity up to 25.6 Tbps in the enterprise. The Q200 ASIC offers high-performance full routing and switching capabilities without external memories. The Catalyst 9600 Series leverages a high-performance multiplecore x86 CPU and is Cisco’s leading purpose-built modular core and edge services enterprise switching platform, built for security, IoT, and cloud.

Cisco Catalyst 9600X Series Supervisor Engine 2

Catalyst 9600X SUP-2 overview

●      The Cisco Silicon One Q200^™ Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC)¹ is purpose built for the next generation network core and edge switch. It is the first enterprise ASIC to offer speeds up to 25.6 Tbps with 8 Bpps of forwarding performance, while supporting high-performance and full routing and switching capabilities without external memories.

●      The Cisco Silicon One Q200 ASIC is built on 7nm fabrication technology, capable of high performancewhile maintaining a low power footprint.

●      The Cisco Silicon One Q200 ASIC includes an 8GB on-chip 2.5D High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), fordeep packet buffers and route table expansion.

●      80MB of dedicated low-latency buffer, with up to 8GB of HBM buffer

●      Intel^® 2.7-GHz x86 CPU with 8 cores and 32GB of DDR4 memory

●      Up to 960 GB of SATA SSD local storage for container-based application hosting (2x 10G SFP+ management ports)

●      ASIC tables for switching scale up to 256K MAC addresses and routing scale up to 2M routes.

●      IPv6 support in hardware provides wire-rate forwarding for IPv6 networks.

●      Dynamic hardware forwarding table allocations enable easy IPv4-to-IPv6 migration.

●      Flexible routing (IPv4, IPv6, and multicast) tables, Layer 2 tables, ACL tables, and QoS tables.

Catalyst 9600 Chassis and Line Cards with C9600X-SUP-2

●      Cisco Catalyst 9606R chassis is hardware ready to support up to 25.6 Tbps in wired switching capacity, with up to 6.4 Tbps bandwidth per slot.

◦    Up to 25.6 Tbps wired switching capacity, with 8 Bpps of forwarding performance is unleashed with Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 2.

●      Up to 8 non-blocking 400 Gigabit Ethernet QSFP-DD ports

●      Up to 128 non-blocking 100 Gigabit Ethernet QSPF28 ports

●      Up to 128 non-blocking 40 Gigabit Ethernet QSPF28 ports

●      Up to 256 non-blocking 50G/25G/10G Gigabit Ethernet QSPF28 ports

●      Up to 192 non-blocking 10 Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 copper ports

◦    NOTE: Supervisor Engine 2 only supports speeds of 10 Gbps or above

●      Hardware support for Application Hosting²

Table 1 shows the supervisor engine and line-card slot assignment options in the Catalyst 9600 Series chassis.

Table 1.        Chassis slot assignment options

Table 2.        Minimum software

Table 3 summarizes the performance capacities of the Supervisor Engine 2.

Table 3.        Bandwidth per slot for the 9606R chassis

Table 4 summarizes the line-card modules supported on the Catalyst 9600 Supervisor Engine 2.

Table 4.        Line-card support for C9600X-SUP-2

Cisco Catalyst 9600 Supervisor Engine 1

Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 1

Catalyst 9600 SUP-1 overview

●      The Cisco Unified Access^™ Data Plane (UADP) Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC)¹ is future-ready for next- generation core technologies, with a programmable pipeline, micro-engine capabilities, and template-based customizable allocation of Layer 2, Layer 3, forwarding, ACL, and Quality-of-Service (QoS) entries.

●      It is the first ASIC to support double-width hardware tables that provides equivalent table size and processing performance for IPv4 and IPv6.

●      2.0-GHz Intel^® x86 CPU with 8 cores.

●      Up to 960 GB of SATASSD local storage for container-based application hosting.

●      Up to 108 MB of buffer (36 MB of unified buffer per ASIC).

●      Line-rate, hardware-based Flexible NetFlow (FNF) delivers flow collection for up to 294,000 flows.

●      IPv6 support in hardware provides wire-rate forwarding for IPv6 networks.

●      Dual-stack support for IPv4 and IPv6 and dynamic hardware forwarding table allocations enable easyIPv4-to-IPv6 migration.

●      Flexible routing (IPv4, IPv6, and multicast) tables, Layer 2 tables, ACL tables, and QoS tables.

Catalyst 9600 Chassis and Line Cards with C9600-SUP-1

Table 5 shows the supervisor engine and line-card slot assignment options in the Catalyst 9600 Series chassis.

Table 5.        Chassis slot assignment options

Table 6.        Minimum software

Table 7 summarizes the performance capacities of the Supervisor Engine 1.

Table 7.        Bandwidth per slot for the 9606R chassis

Table 8 summarizes the line-card modules supported on the Catalyst 9600 Supervisor Engine 1.

Table 8.        Line-card and module support

Cisco IOS XE

This modern operating system for the enterprise provides support for model-driven programmability, on-box Python scripting, streaming telemetry, container-based application hosting, and patching for critical bug fixes. Cisco IOS^® XE also has built-in defenses to protect against runtime attacks.

●      Cisco Plug and Play (PnP) enabled: A simple, secure, unified, and integrated offering to ease new branch or campus device rollouts or updates to an existing network

●      Automated device provisioning: This 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 both turnkey solutions such as Plug and Play (PnP) and off-the-shelf tools such as Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) and Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) that enable an effortless and automated deployment.

●      API-driven configuration: Modern network switches such the Cisco Catalyst 9600X Switch support a wide range of automation features and provide robust open APIs over Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF, RESTCONF and gNMI) using YANG data models for external tools, both off-the-shelf and custom built, to automatically provision network resources.

●      Granular visibility: Model-driven telemetry provides a mechanism to stream data from a switch to a destination. The data to be streamed is driven through subscription to a data set in a YANG model. The subscribed data set is streamed out to the destination at configured intervals. Additionally, Cisco IOS XEenables the push model, which provides near- real-time monitoring of the network, leading to quick detection and rectification of failures.

●      Seamless software upgrades and patching: To enhance OS resilience, Cisco IOS XE supports patching, which provides fixes for critical bugs and security vulnerabilities between regular maintenance releases. This support allows customers to add patches without having to wait for the next maintenance release.

◦    WebUI: Embedded GUI-based device-management tool that provides the ability to provision the device, to simplify device deployment and manageability and to enhance the user experience. WebUIcomes with the default image. There is no need to enable anything or install any license on the device. You can use WebUI to build a day-1 configuration and from then on monitor and troubleshoot the device without having to know how to use the CLI.

Platform benefits

Table 9.        Platform benefits of the Cisco Catalyst 9600 and 9600X

Platform details

Physical specifications

Table 10 lists physical specifications of Catalyst 9600X Supervisor Engine 2 and Supervisor Engine 1

Table 10.     Physical specifications

Supported optics

For details about the different optical modules and the minimum Cisco IOS Software release required for each of the supported optical modules, visit https://tmgmatrix.cisco.com/

Switch Performance

Table 11 highlights the performance and scalability enhancements of the Catalyst 9600X Supervisor Engine 2 and the Catalyst 9600 Supervisor Engine 1

Table 11.     Performance and scalability features of C9600X-SUP-2 and C9600-SUP-1

Flexible ASIC templates - C9600X-SUP-2

Cisco Catalyst 9000 series switches use flexible Software Database Manager (SDM) ASIC templates to enable universal deployments by leveraging the UADP’s ability to create resources to optimize table sizes for different places in the network. Based on how the switch is used in the network, an appropriate standard SDM ASIC template may be selected to configure the switch for specific features.

The following SDM ASIC templates are supported on the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Supervisor Engine 2.

●      Default (Core)

Default SDM ASIC template

Table 12 describes the default SDM ASIC template for C9600X-SUP-2.

Table 12.     SDM template descriptions for C9600X-SUP-2

Custom ASIC template

Standard SDM templates can be used to configure system resources and optimize support for specific features. However, SDM templates are defined based on how the device is deployed in the network.

Beginning with the Cisco IOS XE 17.7.1 release, a custom SDM template allows you to configure several features of the template based on your requirements and not the location of the device in the network.

Table 13 describes the standard SDM ASIC templates for C9600X-SUP-2.

Table 13.     Custom template FIB configurable values for C9600X-SUP-2

●      Learn more.

Flexible ASIC templates - C9600-SUP-1

Standard SDM ASIC templates

Table 14 describes the standard SDM ASIC templates for C9600-SUP-1.

Table 14.     SDM template descriptions for C9600-SUP-1

Performance and scalability numbers are per ASIC where applicable, with three ASICs in the 9600 Series Supervisor Engine 1.

Custom ASIC template

Beginning with the Cisco IOS XE 17.3.1 release, a custom SDM template will allow you to configure the features of the template based on your requirements and not the location of the device in the network.

Table 15.     Custom template configurable FIB values for C9600-SUP-1

Table 16.     Custom template configurable ACL values

Software requirements

Table 17.     Minimum software requirements for C9600X-SUP-2 and C9600-SUP-1

Licensing

Introduction to Smart Licensing

Cisco Smart Licensing is a flexible licensing model that provides you with an easier, faster, and more consistent way to purchase and manage software across the Cisco portfolio and across your organization. And it’s secure – you control what users can access. With Smart Licensing you get:

●      Easy Activation: Smart Licensing establishes a pool of software licenses that can be used across the entire organization—no more PAKs (Product Activation Keys).

●      Unified Management: My Cisco Entitlements (MCE) provides a complete view into all of your Cisco products and services in an easy-to-use portal, so you always know what you have and what you are using.

●      License Flexibility: Your software is not node-locked to your hardware, so you can easily use and transfer licenses as needed.

●      Smart Licensing Using Policy (SLUP): Enhanced version of Smart Licensing, with the overarching objective of providing a licensing solution that does not interrupt the operations of your network, rather, one that enables a compliance relationship to account for the hardware and software licenses you purchase and use.

To use Smart Licensing, you must first set up a Smart Account on Cisco Software Central (software.cisco.com). For a more detailed overview on Cisco Licensing, go to cisco.com/go/licensing guide.

Packaging: Network and Cisco DNA

The Cisco Catalyst 9000 family of switches introduces new packaging that includes vastly simplified base network packages (Network Advantage) and term-based software packages (Cisco DNA Advantage) as add-ons. The Cisco DNA packages, in addition to on-box capabilities, also unlock additional functionality in Cisco DNA Center, enabling controller-based software- defined automation in your network.

For information about feature support on specific models, please refer to the Cisco Feature Navigator (https://cfn.cloudapps.cisco.com/ITDIT/CFN/jsp/index.jsp) and the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Release Notes.

License consumption is further simplified to the following combinations:

Advantage: This consists of Perpetual Network Advantage and a term-based (3-, 5-, or 7-year) Cisco DatAdvantage package.

Note that it is not required to deploy Cisco DNA Center just to use one of the above packages. Refer to https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/software/one-wireless-subscription/q-and-a-c67-739601.pdf for additional details about Advantage packages.

Cisco DNA Advantage subscription

Cisco DNA Advantage subscriptions offer a flexible way to buy software for the access, WAN, core, and data center domains. At each stage in the product lifecycle, Cisco DNA Advantage subscriptions help make buying, managing, and upgrading your network and infrastructure software easier. Cisco DNA Advantage subscriptions provide:

●      Flexible licensing models to smoothly distribute customers’ software spending over time

●      Investment protection for software purchases through software services-enabled license portability

●      Lower cost of entry with the new Cisco DNA Advantage Subscription for Switching model

For ordering information for Cisco DNA Advantage Software for Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Switches, go to: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/software/one-subscription-switching/index.html.

Table 18 lists the features of the Network Advantage packages. Table 16 lists the features of the Cisco DatAdvantage.

Table 18.     Network advantage package features

Table 19.     Cisco DNA Advantage package features

For a full list of network stack features as well as Cisco DNA Advantage features, please visit: https://www.cisco.com/c/m/en_us/products/software/dna-subscription-switching/en-sw-sub-matrix-switching.html?OID=otren019471

Management and standards support

Table 20 shows management and standards support for the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series.

Table 20.     Management and standards support

Safety and compliance

Table 21.     Safety and compliance information

Warranty

Cisco Enhanced Limited Lifetime Hardware Warranty

The Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Switches come with an Enhanced Limited Lifetime Warranty (E-LLW) that includes Next-Business- Day (NBD) delivery of replacement hardware where available and 90 days of 8x5 Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) support.

Your formal warranty statement, including the warranty applicable to Cisco software, appears in the information packet that accompanies your Cisco product. We encourage you to review the warranty statement shipped with your specific product carefully before use.

Cisco reserves the right to refund the purchase price as its exclusive warranty remedy.

For further information about warranty terms, visit https://www.cisco.com/go/warranty.

Table 22 provides information about the E-LLW.

Table 22.     E-LLW details

Environmental sustainability

Table 23.     Information about Cisco’s environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives and performance is provided in Cisco’s CSR and sustainability reporting.

Cisco and Partner Services

Successfully deploy, manage, and support Cisco Catalyst 9000 switches with a full life cycle of Cisco Services including implementation, optimization, technical, managed and training services. Our team of experts can help you speed deployment, reduce costs and minimize risk as you introduce new hardware, software and protocols into the network. As your trusted advisor, we help you achieve extraordinary business outcomes, minimize risk and disruption so you can anticipate change and pivot quickly, securely, and confidently.

Table 24.     Technical Services

Learn more about available services.

Software Policy for Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Switches

Software Policy for Network Stack components

Customers with the Network Essentials Stack and Network Advantage Stack software feature sets will be provided with maintenance updates and bug fixes designed to maintain the compliance of the software with published specifications, release notes, and industry standards as long as the original end user continues to own or use the product or up to one year from the end-of-sale date for this product, whichever occurs earlier.

Cisco Software Support Service for Cisco DNA Term components

Cisco Software Support Service (SWSS) delivers the right support for Cisco software products and suites. It will keep your business applications performing as expected and protects your investment. Cisco SWSS for Cisco DNA Essentials and Cisco DNA Advantage term components is included as part of the switch value. SWSS provides access to TAC support, major software updates, maintenance and minor software releases, and the Cisco Software Support site for increased productivity with anytime access.

Ordering information

Table 25 contains ordering information for the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series.

Table 25.     Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series ordering information

Cisco Capital

Flexible payment solutions to help you achieve your objectives

Cisco Capital makes it easier to get the right technology to achieve your objectives, enable business transformation and help you stay competitive. We can help you reduce the total cost of ownership, conserve capital, and accelerate growth. In more than 100 countries, our flexible payment solutions can help you acquire hardware, software, services and complementary third-party equipment in easy, predictable payments. Learn more.

Document history