9 Reasons We Believe the Catalyst 9000 Rocks

The Catalyst 9000 series is a new family of enterprise switches we recently announced. The engineering team purpose built this switch for the new realities of the digital era delivering innovations in the areas of security, mobility, cloud, and IoT. We started out about two years ago wanting to build more than just another switch. This meant innovating the entire stack right from the underlying ASIC technology, developing a modern operating system and, most importantly, delivering software innovations towards an intent-driven infrastructure. And, I am proud of how the team has delivered! The Catalyst 9000 series packs a punch with unmatched security, analytics, programmability and performance to enable intent-based networking.

Here are the top nine proof points that demonstrate how the Catalyst 9000 delivers:

The art of security. The Catalyst 9000 series – the only switches to deliver state-of-the-art malware detection through behavioral and pattern-based analytics on encrypted traffic by Encrypted Threat Analytics (ETA) without the need of decrypting the application. This was a problem largely assumed to be ‘unsolvable’. Glad that the team here did not know what that word means!

And, the science of security. We took security one step further (or behind; depends on how you see it) by securing the device out-of-the-box and securely storing encryption keys and other valuable data on the switch.

Programmable everything. We’re so stoked to present a fully programmable Switch – right from a programmable x86 CPU complex, programmable ASIC and programmable OPEN IOS-XE. This is literally the only Campus/Branch switch that offers model-driven programmability and streaming telemetry. Look inside your network, automate it and glean insights from it. Welcome to the era of intent-based networking!

The trendsetter among switches. Ergonomic, stylish and yet powerful, the Catalyst 9000 series is a sight for sore eyes. Here’s why the industry is raving about our decision to partner with Pininfarina, the famed design house behind Ferrari, to design the hardware. But we’re not just skin deep! The switch comes with inbuilt RFID and blue beacon capabilities and has been rigorously tested to perform, last and astound.

Always ON. The Catalyst 9000 series of switches introduces patching capabilities for the first time in the enterprise switching market. This significantly simplifies operations by enabling customers to overcome security vulnerabilities without having to certify a new software image. The modular platform supports software upgrades without any impact to voice or video applications. The fixed switches boast the highest UPOE density in the industry along with Perpetual PoE critical to allow this generation of IOT devices to always be powered on.

Built for the future today. This series of switches have been built ground-up to handle the scale of the IOT boom without compromising on the ability to segment the network. The benefits of enterprise network virtualization that allow scale with segmentation are just beginning to get tapped.

Primed for Cloud. The Catalyst 9000 comes equipped with a DevOps toolkit. In addition to Cisco and partner applications, customers have the capability to create and manage applications that can be locally hosted on the switch in a container-based hosting environment.

Simple. From operating the switch to the licensing terms to consumption of the features, the Catalyst 9000 is every network engineer’s dream. Networking is now intuitive in a way that was previously unimaginable!

Mobility that drives networking transformation. The 9000 series offer converged wired and wireless network services across security (segmentation, Policy, ETA) for both user-operated and IOT devices.

As an engineer, any new product excites me and infuses the team with a child-like enthusiasm. But, building the Catalyst 9000 was an attempt at providing solutions to networking challenges that are yet to be uncovered. We built the Catalyst 9000 series for technologies that will change the future. The best is yet to come. Join us on the ride ahead.