The 13-slot chassis is ideally suited for high performance, high port density Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet aggregation in all parts of the network including the access, distribution, and backbone layers as well as the server farm and data center environments. With up to 12 payload slots available, the 13-slot chassis offers industry leading 10/100BASE-TX and Gigabit Ethernet port densities while providing unsurpassed levels of network resilience.

The 6500 switch supports a wide range of interface types and densities, to include support for up to 576 10/100BASE-TX Ethernet, 288 100FX Fast Ethernet, 12 OC12 ATM, and up to 194 Gigabit Ethernet ports - the highest in the industry. The architecture of the Catalyst 6500 Series supports scalable switching bandwidth up to 256Gbps and scalable multilayer switching up to 210MBps. For customers not requiring the performance of the Catalyst 6500 Series, For investment protection, both series support the same suite of supervisors, interface line cards, and common equipment providing a wide range of price/performance options.

Support for multiple levels of network resiliency and serviceability. Device-level fault tolerance, to include the following options:
Redundant Supervisors
Redundant Load-Sharing Power Supplies (AC & DC)
Redundant Load-Sharing Fans
Redundant System Clocks
Redundant Uplinks
Redundant Switch Fabrics

All system elements including power supplies, fans, supervisors, line-card modules, and switch fabrics are hot-swappable such that elements can be added, removed or replaced without service interruption of unrelated traffic flows. In dual-Supervisor configurations, Cisco`s Fast-Switchover will transfer switch control to the redundant Supervisor within seconds for mission-critical applications requiring maximum network availability. All system elements are also field replaceable units (FRUs) for maximizing serviceability and minimizing network downtime

Embedded Manageability
NewFlow data export
TopN ports report
RMON agent
HC RMON (High Capacity, 64-bit counters)
Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) and Enhanced-SPAN
Multiple Concurrent SPAN
Remote SPAN
Filtered SPAN
Syslog support