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The new innovation provides the customers of Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switch with enormous capabilities. This decade witnessed the growth of video traffic, cloud computing is popularizing, to meet all these business demands in upcoming years Cisco Systems are ready with the Supervisor Engine 2T.

We all know the legacy and popularity of Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches, a de facto industry standard switching platform at the heart of the world’s campus, data center, WAN, and Metro Ethernet networks.

The Catalyst 6500 led the industry’s port transition first from Fast Ethernet speeds to Gigabit Ethernet and then to 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

With introduction of Nexus Series of Switches I was bit afraid what Cisco is going to with the introduction of a new Supervisor Engine for Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switch? The introduction of Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Supervisor Engine 2T on July 12^th 2011 eased my curiosity.

The Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Supervisor Engine 2T has lot to offer, a state of art 2-terabit card that unlocks 80 gigabits per second per slot, new feature-rich 10-gigabit and 10-Gigabit Ethernet line cards, and next-generation borderless services that provide customers with new mobility, security, network analysis and load balancing capabilities.

The Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Supervisor Engine 2T  is compatible with all Cisco E-Series chassis models, offering minimal intervention to the existing Catalyst 6500 E-Series infrastructure. The new Catalyst 6500 Series is available now and the SUP2T has a list price of $38,000.

Some of the features of the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Supervisor Engine 2T   are as follows

• Maintain investment protection through backward compatibility
• Deliver scalability and performance improvements such as distributed forwarding (dCEF) 720Mpps with the fourth-generation Policy Feature Card (PFC4)
• Support future 40Gbps interface and nonblocking 10Gbps modules
• Enable new applications and services with hardware accelerated VPLS, Layer 2 over mGRE for Network Virtualization
• Take advantage of integrated Connectivity Management Processor (CMP) for improved out-of-band management.

The Supervisor Engine 2T maintains backward compatibility with released line cards, chassis, and power supplies.

Interconnecting Data Centers Using VPLS is a book which aims at providing solutions that provide a high speed, low latency network and spanning tree protocol (STP) isolation between data centers based on Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS).

Pic Courtesy: Cisco Press

The book makes interesting reading, especially as it covers in detail about the architecture design and configuration required to interconnect data centers as well as case studies to interconnect Data Centers.  This book is targeted to Systems professionals and System engineers who are into designing solutions for interconnecting data centers which ensures high availability Layer 2 connectivity and STP isolation.

The authors Nash Darukhanawalla and Patrice Bellagamba started the book with explaining the need for high availability of the Data Centers, explaining the concept of the high availability clusters, introduction to Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), MPLS traffic engineering.

The authors’ present different flavors of data center interconnect solution using different combination of Spanning Tree modes, VLAN mapping as well other criteria’s along with complete configuration required at the  aggregation switches and provider edge routers.

The book is divided into 13 chapters, and it also deals with issues related to layer 2 bridging domains and provides guidance to extend VLANs using Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS). This book contains lot of reference network diagrams which can help the readers to understand the presented solutions in normal mode as well as in failover mode.

I found this book extremely readable and enjoyable and I would recommend this book to the folks who are interested in knowing more about the Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS). The book comes with lot of useful information which will definitely help the readers to get familiar with the Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) concepts and configuration steps required for interconnecting data centers.

Cisco Press just released the book “Interconnecting Data Centers Using VPLS (Ensure Business Continuance on Virtualized Networks by Implementing Layer 2 Connectivity Across Layer 3)” . This book deals with the interconnection of Data Centers using VPLS . Virtualization techniques were developed to solve many problems with business continuance; however these solutions now pose severe network challenges and business continuance issues of their own. This book describes Cisco’s break-through solutions that evolve your network toward support of server virtualization techniques ensuring a highly-resilient network solution by implementing Layer 2 connectivity across Layer 3 network infrastructure using VPLS.

·         Interconnecting Data Centers Using VPLS (Ensure Business Continuance on Virtualized Networks by Implementing Layer 2 Connectivity Across Layer 3)
By Nash Darukhanawalla, Patrice Bellagamba.

·         Published by Cisco Press.

·         Series: Networking Technology.

http://www.ciscopress.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=1587059924Source:

www.ciscopress.com

www.ciscopress.com