Cisco Catalyst 9500 Series – High-Performance Switches
With modern enterprises growing larger and larger, the networking requirements to keep operations running have also risen significantly. For most modern enterprises, a small number of systems is not enough to maintain operational efficacy.
To mitigate this issue, Cisco has released its 9500 series switches, which are comprised of several core aggregation features. These help enterprises improve network connectivity, scalability, and ease of network management without sacrificing network performance. Let us take a look at some of the Cisco Catalyst 9500 series switches’ aggregation features.
Aggregation Features of Cisco Catalyst 9500 Series Switches
Built to Aggregate for Performance
Aggregation switches take center stage in an enterprise campus, funneling all the access layer traffic down to one or more core routers or data center. The Cisco Catalyst 9500 is a star system in this department as it claims 6.4 Tbps of switching, enabling 1G, 10G, 25GbE to even 100G ups.
This allows enterprises to manage large rate flows through low latency, high reliability delivery from edges to applications and services in the cloud. Enterprises now can enable end-to-end seamless communication between endpoints, applications, and cloud services at low latency and high reliability.
StackWise Virtual Technology
One of the attributes that makes Cisco Catalyst 9500 series a great choice for an aggregation switch is due to its support for StackWise Virtual. This is a technology that allows running two separate switches as a single logical unit, thereby improving availability and making management simple.
By using StackWise Virtual enterprises can deploy Multi-Chassis EtherChannel for link redundancy and load balancing across the physical switches. This results in massive improvement in network availability and simplifies the failover mechanisms which is critical at the aggregation level.
Segmentation Capabilities
Cisco Catalyst 9500 Brocade support for all Layer 3 protocols (OSPF/BGP/EIGRP/IS-IS/PIM for multicast) and dynamic routing leaves room to make the switch even more dynamic as enterprise starts to employ more advanced strategies.
It also includes advanced functions such as Segment Routing and VXLAN-BGP EVPN that allow effective path control, network virtualization between sites as well as scalable segmentation.
These dynamic routing capabilities build highly available and programmable networks that are core necessities in complex, distributed enterprise environments. They enable Cisco Catalyst 9500 series switches to deliver high performance to enterprise networks without sacrificing on connectivity.
The added benefits of scalability make this one of the most crucial components of a Cisco Catalyst 9500 series switch for enterprise networks.
Cisco DNA Center
Every Cisco Catalyst 9500 series switch is equipped with the Cisco DNA Center, which is Cisco’s network management and automation platform. It delivers telemetry in real-time, intelligent analytics, and automated provisioning, which are critical for the management of aggregation layers while putting little or no manual effort.
They provide information that the admin is able to use to spot traffic patterns, alarms on issues and improve performance. Also, Quality of Service capabilities are highly tuned to prioritize critical applications and apply traffic rules correctly, especially useful when both voice, video, and data are required to be processed concurrently without degradation.
Secure Aggregation
All aggregation needs to be secure, and the Catalysts are providing both layers of protection. The switch possesses hardware based MACsec encryption (802.1AE) so that it protects the link-end data without any performance loss.
End-to-end security provided by TrustSec makes a scalable, software-defined edge as a service at layer 2, using identity and context, not just IP, to hand out access.
The Catalyst 9500 also supports Encrypted Traffic Analytics, allowing the identification of malicious patterns in encrypted traffic without decrypting the data itself. Combined, these features make the Catalyst 9500 an ideal choice for secure aggregation in modern zero-trust network architectures.
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