The Cisco Catalyst 6500 Supervisor Engine 2T is the newest addition to the family of supervisor engines. The Supervisor Engine 2T is designed to deliver higher performance, better scalability, and enhanced hardware-enabled features. Supervisor Engine 2T integrates a high-performance 2-Terabit crossbar switch fabric that enables 80 Gbps switching capacity per slot on all Cisco Catalyst 6500 E-Series Chassis. The forwarding engine on Supervisor Engine 2T is capable of delivering high-performance forwarding for Layer 2 and Layer 3 services. Supervisor Engine 2T delivers many new hardware-enabled innovations in the areas of security, quality of service (QoS), virtualization, and manageability. The rich feature set of Supervisor Engine 2T enhances applications such as traditional IP forwarding, Layer 2 and Layer 3 Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) VPNs, and VPLS. The Cisco Catalyst 6500 with Supervisor Engine 2T and all the features and the technical advancements establish product leadership in borderless networks as well as data center deployments.

Supervisor Engine 2T delivers scalable performance, intelligence, and a broad set of features to address the needs of Borderless Networks, data centers, and service provider networks. Some of the primary features for Supervisor Engine 2T include:

- Platform scalability: Delivering up to 80 Gbps per slot of switching capacity on E-Series chassis; 2-Terabit aggregate bandwidth capacity using the 6513-E chassis, scaling to 4-Terabit capacity with VSS. Support for up to 1056 ports of 1Gbps and 352 ports of 10Gbps systems deployed with VSS. Providing 1Gbps/10Gbps and 40Gbps interface support to address future customer bandwidth growth requirements.

- Security: Support for Cisco TrustSec, CTS, providing MacSec encryption and Role-Based ACL. Providing control plane policing to address denial of service attacks.

- Virtualization: Native support for VPLS, as well as enhancements such as VPN-aware NAT, VPN statistics, and VPN netflow as important features needed for deployment of network virtualization.

- Netflow application monitoring: Supervisor Engine 2T supports enhanced application monitoring such as Flexible and Sampled Netflow for intelligent and scalable application monitoring.