Cisco Catalyst 6503-E vs HPE Aruba CX 6405
Side-by-side specifications from the vendors' own documents. The Cisco Catalyst 6503-E is a compact 3-slot enterprise chassis delivering the carrier-class feature set of the Catalyst 6500 series in a 4U rack profile. The Aruba CX 6405 is a 5-slot high-density modular chassis switch engineered for enterprise campus aggregation and core layers.
| Cisco Catalyst 6503-E | HPE Aruba CX 6405 | |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | Cisco | HPE |
| Status | end-of-sale | current |
| Released | May 2005 | Oct 2019 |
| Form factor | modular chassis | 5-slot modular chassis |
| Chassis slots | 3 | — |
| Supervisor slots | Slot 1 or 2 (dedicated supervisor) | — |
| Line card slots | 2 payload slots | Up to 5 line card slots (or 4 with dual management) |
| Chassis height | 4U rack mount | — |
| Backplane capacity | Up to 80 Gbps per slot with modern fabric modules | — |
| Power supplies | Dual redundant hot-swappable AC or DC power supplies | — |
| Form factor | — | 5U 5-slot modular chassis |
| Management slots | — | Dual redundant Management Modules (active/standby) |
| Fabric slots | — | Up to 4 fabric modules |
| Switching capacity | — | Up to 14 Tbps switching bandwidth |
| Port density | — | Up to 120 1GbE/Smart Rate ports or 96 10G/25G SFP28 ports |
| High availability | — | Non-Stop Switching (VSX), Non-Stop Routing, live software updates |
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