/mcpData sheet Cisco public © 2025 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Introduction Reimagine, reinforce, redefine The Cisco Catalyst™ 9500 Series, including the Catalyst 9500X models, continues to shape the future with continued innovation that helps you reimagine connections, reinforce security and redefine the experience for your hybrid workforce big and small. Cisco Catalyst 9500 Series Switches, based on the Cisco® Unified Access Data Plane (UADP) Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), are Cisco’s lead fixed enterprise core and aggregation switching platform and, as part of the Catalyst 9000 family, are built to transform your network to handle a hybrid world where the workplace is anywhere, endpoints could be anything, and applications are hosted all over the place. The Cisco Catalyst 9500X switches, based on the Cisco Silicon One™ Q200 ASIC, are purpose built for the next- generation core, with a programmable pipeline (P4), and are the first network silicon to offer switching capacity up to 12.8- Tbps full duplex in the enterprise. The Q200 ASIC offers high performance along with full routing and switching capabilities without external memories. This is enabled by an internal architecture that includes an on-chip High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM). The Catalyst 9500X switches leverage a high-performance multiple-core x86 CPU and are Cisco’s leading purpose-built fixed core and edge services enterprise switching platform, built for security, IoT, and cloud. The Cisco Catalyst 9500X switches are the industry’s first purpose-built fixed 10, 25, 50, 40, 100, 200, and 400 Gigabit Ethernet switches targeted for the enterprise campus. The Catalyst 9500X switches deliver unmatched forwarding scale (MAC addresses, IP unicast and multicast routes, Multiprotocol Label Switching [MPLS] labels) and deep buffering for enterprise applications. The Catalyst 9500X models include nonblocking 50 Gigabit Ethernet Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP-56) and nonblocking 400 Gigabit Ethernet Quad SFP Double Density (QSFP-DD) ports. Catalyst 9500 Series switches support advanced routing and infrastructure services (such as MPLS Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNs, Multicast VPN [MVPN], and Network Address Translation [NAT]); Cisco Software-Defined Access capabilities (such as a host tracking database, cross-domain connectivity, and VPN Routing and Forwarding [VRF]- aware Locator/ID Separation Protocol [LISP]); and network system virtualization with Cisco StackWise® Virtual technology that are critical for their placement in the campus core. The 9500 Series also supports foundational high-availability capabilities such as patching, Cisco Nonstop Forwarding with Stateful Switchover (NSF/SSO), redundant Platinum-rated power supplies, and fans, while supporting a wide array of optics. The switches provide an operational choice of Cisco Catalyst Center or Cisco Meraki® cloud monitoring. The foundation of Software-Defined Access The enterprise network lies at the heart of digital transformation. A network that is open, programmable, integrated, and secure maximizes business agility, allowing new business opportunities to be pursued and captured. The Cisco Networking Cloud with Software-Defined Access (SD-Access) is the network fabric that powers business. Cisco SD-Access is an open and extensible, software-driven architecture that accelerates and simplifies your enterprise network operations. SD-Access enables policy-based automation from edge to cloud with foundational capabilities. Cloud Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) fabric capabilities are supported for high-performance Cisco Catalyst 9500 models being managed from the Meraki dashboard. Learn more about cloud management and cloud fabric here.