Overview; Unified Access Campus Design - Cisco Catalyst 6500-E Series Manual

Overview

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The Cisco Catalyst 6500-E Series Switch has been a strategic platform for more than a decade, traditionally
providing services in the access, distribution, and core areas of campus, data center, and WAN networks for
companies in every possible vertical. As market trends have changed to meet evolving customer demands, the
Cisco Catalyst 6500-E Series Switch has adapted to support these new trends.
The influx of mobile devices, both corporately and personally owned, into the corporate campus network
environment has forced IT departments to examine their network infrastructure to support these additional
collaboration, video, and mobility needs. To address these requirements, the Cisco Catalyst 6500-E Series Switch
has once again advanced its capabilities in the areas of smart operations, security, application visibility and
control, and resiliency. With these enhancements, the Cisco Catalyst 6500-E Series Switch with Supervisor
Engine 2T is the best choice for the backbone of the unified access campus architecture, delivering the services
required to support an enterprisewide bring your own device (BYOD) infrastructure supporting video and
collaboration services.

Unified Access Campus Design

Figure 1 shows a unified access campus architecture that will be referenced throughout this document.
Figure 1. Unified Access Campus Design
Let us examine the different layers of the unified access campus architecture in Figure 1. Starting at the access
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layer are the Cisco Aironet 2600 and 3600 Series Access Points. These connect to (from left to right) access
layer switches from the Cisco Catalyst 3850, 4500-E, and 3750-X Series of switches. The Cisco Catalyst 3850 is a
new concept in switching, offering converged wired and wireless in a single platform so that organizations can
scale the wireless infrastructures that will be needed to support the proliferating BYOD requirements that are
emerging in the industry.
The highlighted area illustrates where the Cisco Catalyst 6500-E with Supervisor Engine 2T (shown with integrated
Wireless Services Module 2 [WiSM2]) will be positioned in the unified access campus architecture. The
distribution and core layers of the network form the backbone of the unified access campus architecture and
require a platform that is highly available, rich in services, and scalable enough to support the trends of BYOD,
video, and collaboration being seen in today's enterprise networks.
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