The Cisco® Catalyst® 6500 Series offer a variety of 10 Gigabit Ethernet modules to serve different needs in the campus and data center for enterprise, commercial, and service provider customers: 16-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet module, 8-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet module, and 4-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet module. These modules support pluggable optics to support distances up to 80 km over single-mode fiber, 300m over multimode fiber, and 15m over copper.

The 16-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet module provides up to 130 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a single Cisco Catalyst 6500 chassis and 260 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a virtual switching system (VSS) and is targeted for LAN campus aggregation and data center access, where fanout and port density are very important. It consists of 4 port groups of 4 ports each. Users can operate each port group in either oversubcription mode (2 to 4 ports used per port group) or performance mode (1 port used per port group), allowing maximum flexibility for using some ports for connection to servers in performance mode and some other uplinks to wiring closets in oversubscription mode. When in performance mode, up to four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports can be used to create a virtual switch link in a VSS.1 In addition, the 16-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet module has reduced power consumption. It uses half the power per port compared to the 8-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet module, providing substantial power savings to the customer.