A Wall Street analyst firm report says that Cisco is readying a Catalyst 6500 switch upgrade that will double bandwidth on the device, offering customers greater support for 10G Ethernet LANs.

According to Cisco, it also simplifies operation management by allowing multiple Catalyst 6500 Series switches to share a single point of management, single routing instance and single IP address ...

Cisco says it has 25,000 customers for the Catalyst 6500 and 700,000 chassis installed worldwide, representing 70 million gigabit ports, 2.1 million 10G ports and 1.2 million supervisor engines.

Hewlett Packard is questioning Cisco's assertion that its upgraded Catalyst 6500 switch provides better investment protection and value than a comparable data networking switch infrastructure from HP.

Sales of Cisco Systems' Catalyst 6500 switches have topped $20 billion, making it the most successful networking product ever, the company said Tuesday at its Networkers 2006 conference in Las Vegas.

The Catalyst 6500 is one of Cisco’s main chassis-based switch platforms for enterprises and service providers. The security modules also can be deployed in the Cisco 7600 Series router.

For the flagship 6500 line, Cisco is introducing the Virtual Switching Supervisor Engine 720, a hardware module that can make two 6500 switches behave and appear to administrators as one.

eWEEK Labs visited Cisco's engineering labs in January for a first-hand look at the step-by-step process of converting two Catalyst 6500 switch chassis into one virtual chassis using the latest ...

Cisco routers use what is known as IOS and the version can be seen by typing in "show version" at a priveledge mode prompt. The CatOS is in the 5.x and 6.x range with IOS being in the 11.x to 12.x ...

Cisco says it has 25,000 customers for the Catalyst 6500 and 700,000 chassis installed worldwide, representing 70 million gigabit ports, 2.1 million 10G ports and 1.2 million supervisor engines.