Catalyst 6500 Speaks: Happy Birthday Sup720, Here’s To The Big 10

Or in IPv6 speak, you’re an “A”, for Awesome

Today Supervisor 720, the most widely deployed Catalyst 6500 Supervisor Engine, turns 10-years old.

Supervisor 720 was launched on March 31, 2003. It enabled me to be the first modular switch to support true 10G Ethernet . Supervisor 720 has brought extensive feature set such as MPLS, VPNs, and VSS over the last 10 years.  If has also spread throughout the world over the last 10 years as the graphic (created using Tableau) shows.

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Supervisor 720 has served well and now the newest engine, the Supervisor 2T , launched in 2011, triples the performance of Supervisor 720, quadruples the scalability, adds support for 40G interfaces and is ready to support 100G. Supervisor 2T inherits all the great features of Supervisor 720 and delivers a broad set of additional features such as native VPLS, Flexible Netlfow, Trustsec, EVN, Medianet and Distributed Policing to mention a few. Supervisor 2T will also support OpenFlow, LISP, and next-generation VSS.

Investment protection is in my DNA. When a customer upgrades from Supervisor 720 to Supervisor 2T, the same E-series chassis, many of the line cards and service modules will work seamlessly.. Since both Supervisors are based on Cisco IOS, network administrators can leverage their expertise and existing operational processes for faster adoption.

Happy 10th Birthday, Supervisor 720! I look forward to celebrating the same for Supervisor 2T in 8 years.