Friday, January 21, 2011

Feature Comparison of the Nexus 7000 and Catalyst 6500 Series Switches


Overview

The current focus of the Nexus 7000 is to provide high density 10Gb Ethernet switching for LAN traffic primarily in the data center. (Cisco is planning to provide unified I/O supporting SAN traffic on the Nexus 7000 in the future.) My understanding is that service modules or WAN modules in the high performance backplane of the Nexus 7000 would not be very cost effective, so that an external appliance or service layer should be used to provide these features. The NX-OS is based on the Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS Software, and focuses on modularity. As needed, you need to enable the features with the feature feature-name configuration command. In the NX-OS 4.1, the following features can be enabled:

feature bgp
feature cts
feature dhcp
feature dot1x
feature eigrp
feature eou
feature glbp
feature hsrp
feature interface-vlan
feature isis
feature lacp
feature msdp
feature netflow
feature ospf
feature ospfv3
feature pbr
feature pim
feature pim6
feature port-security
feature private-vlan
feature rip
feature scheduler
feature ssh
feature tacacs+
feature telnet
feature tunnel
featur udld
feature vpc
feature vrrp
feature vtp
(Some features are available through licensing, others are bundled in the base NX-OS.)

The focus of the Catalyst 6500 is for all purpose enterprise switching and routing, and it supports a multitude of interface types and service modules. The Catalyst 6500 is a work horse of switch. Typically all features in the operating system license are preloaded, and just need to be configured for your specific environment.

Option Summary of the Cisco Nexus 7000 and Catalyst 6500:
OptionNexus 7000Catalyst 6500
Operating SystemNX-OS 4.012.2SXH
switch virtualization supportVDCVSS
service module support--yes
NSF w/ SSOyesyes
enhanced Fast Software Upgrade--yes
sup engine redundancyyesyes
48 port 10/100/1000 Ethernetyesyes
four port 10GE linecard--yes
eight port 10GE linecard--yes
thirty-two port 10GE linecardyes--
T1/E1 WAN--yes
T3/E3 WAN--yes
HSSI--yes
T3/E3 ATM--yes
OC-3 ATM--yes
OC-3 Packet over SONET--yes
OC-12--yes
OC-48--yes
OC-192--yes
SONET--yes
centralized forwarding--yes
distributed forwardingyesyes
PoE for GE--yes
EtherChannel/Port Channelyesyes
Multichassis EtherChannelyesyes
VLANsyesyes
private VLANsyesyes
802.1Q tunnelingyesyes
Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol--yes
RPVSTyesyes
MSTyesyes
MPLS--yes
AToMPLS--yes
FRoMPLS--yes
EoMPLS--yes
MPLS VPNs--yes
iBGP and eBGPyesyes
OSPFyesyes
EIGRPyesyes
ISISyesyes
VRRPyesyes
HSRPyesyes
GLBPyesyes
IP Multicastyesyes
IGMPv1/v2/v3yesyes
IGMP Snoopingyesyes
PIMv1/v2yesyes
MSDPyesyes
SSMyesyes
IPv6 routingyesyes
IPv6 Multicast routingyesyes
Policy Based Routingyesyes
QoS - LLQ--yes
NBAR--yes
VLAN ACLsyesyes
CoPPyesyes
DHCP Snoopingyesyes
IP Source Guardyesyes
Dynamic ARP Inspectionyesyes
802.1X Authenticationyesyes
NetFlow v8--yes
NetFlow v9yes--
SPAN/RSPANyesyes
Cisco TrustSecyes--

No comments:

Post a Comment