The Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches offer a variety of 10 Gigabit Ethernet modules to serve different needs in the campus and data center for enterprise, commercial, and service provider customers. The Cisco Catalyst 6900 Series 8-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fiber Module is the first 10 Gigabit Ethernet Module for the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switch that supports Cisco TrustSec and Layer 2 encryption in hardware to enable IEEE 802.1ae (MACSec) encryption for Role-Based Access Control (RBACL) functionality. The module has two 40 Gbps connections (for a total of 80 Gbps) to the 2Tbps switch fabric of the Supervisor Engine 2T and therefore is able to deliver 10 Gigabit performance on all 8 ports for larger than 128 bytes size packets with no oversubscription. The new Cisco Catalyst 6900 Series 8-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fiber module supports Virtual Switch Link (VSL) on all 8 ports. The Cisco Catalyst 6900 Series 8-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fiber Module supports pluggable X2 optics, providing operational distances of up to 80 km over single-mode fiber and 300m over multimode fiber allowing for deployment in various types of networking environments. The Cisco Catalyst 6900 Series 8-Port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fiber Module is only compatible with the new Cisco Catalyst 6500 Supervisor Engine 2T (VS-S2T-10G or VS-S2T-10G-XL), enabling the system to deliver three times the performance and four times the scalability for Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches in comparison to the previous generation.

The new Cisco Catalyst 6900 Series 8-Port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fiber module is designed for deployment in the distribution and core of the campus and data center for traffic aggregation in a network requiring security, manageability, virtualization, application performance, and video. With its large 256 MB packet buffers per port, no oversubscription, and distributed forwarding with high scalability, the new Cisco Catalyst 6900 Series 8-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fiber module is able to deliver secure and predictable performance for bandwidth-intensive applications such as market data feeds in the financial vertical or video broadcast in campus networks.

The 8-Port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fiber Module (Figure 1) provides up to 88 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fiber ports in a single Cisco Catalyst 6513-E chassis and 176 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a Cisco Catalyst 6500 Virtual Switching System (VSS) 4T.