The Cisco Catalyst 6800ia solution offers network administrators the ability to look at buildings in a campus network as a single switch. The entire building can be viewed as a single management entity. The Cisco Catalyst 6800ia solution is managed by the parent Cisco Catalyst 6500/6800 switch. The Cisco Catalyst 6800ia solution offers feature consistency across the access and distribution layers of the campus Ethernet network. The Cisco Catalyst 6800ia is an extension of the Cisco Catalyst 6500/6800 parent switch. The Cisco Catalyst 6800ia solution is very resilient with its support of multichassis EtherChannel and stacking. The Cisco Catalyst 6800ia solution does not use Spanning Tree Protocol in the links between the Cisco Catalyst 6800ia switch and the Cisco Catalyst 6500/6800 parent switch. The Cisco Catalyst 6800ia solution supports Virtual Switching System Cisco Catalyst 6800ia switches do not perform any local packet forwarding. All traffic originating from host ports (downlink ports) of a Cisco Catalyst 6800ia switch will be sent to an Instant Access parent, which makes all the switching and forwarding decisions for the traffic to be forwarded to the destination.The Cisco Catalyst 6800ia switch inherits the features and capabilities of its parent in an Instant Access solution. Consider the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Supervisor Engine 2T as an Instant Access parent switch. In this case the Cisco Catalyst 6800ia client switch will inherit all the features of the Supervisor Engine 2T, which includes Security Group Tags (SGT), Security Group Access Control List (SGACL), Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), IPv6, mediatrace, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), and so on: - 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports - Integrated FlexStack-Plus capability, which provides up to 80 Gbps stack bandwidth - Support of up to five members in a stack - Two 10G Small Form-Factor Pluggable Plus (SFP+) uplinks - External RPS power redundancy for Cisco Catalyst 6800ia - Mini USB and Ethernet ports for versatile console management - All ports in Cisco Catalyst 6800ia series are MACsec hardware ready - IEEE 802.3az Energy-Efficient Ethernet (EEE) enables dynamic power savings on all switch ports