C9200-STACK-KIT enable the StackWise-160/80 architecture which allows stacking of up to eight switches in a ring topology to achieve a high density of stack bandwidth. The stacking architecture expands the switches’ form factor, switching capacity, port density, and redundancy as well as providing a single control plane. It also provides resiliency, scalability, and central management. The latest Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series Switches support StackWise-160, whereas the Cisco Catalyst 9200L models support StackWise-80. This technology is flexible, modular, and evolutionary, and it delivers Cisco IOS^® XE feature capabilities with hardware acceleration to every port in the stack.

Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series Switches come in data, Power over Ethernet (PoE), and Multigigabit versions. Each version has 24-port and 48-port variants. The hardware design of each model is cost-effective to support different network capacity load and switching performance.

Up to a maximum of eight switches can be stacked together physically in a ring topology to form a single, unified, virtual stack system. A Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series Switch, when deployed in StackWise-160/80 mode, has been designed to deliver deterministic and nonblocking switching performance to a maximum port density of 448 ports with a distributed data plane, single control plane, and management plane. The switching performance delivers hardware-accelerated, integrated borderless network services such as PoE, PoE+, Quality of Service (QoS), Access Control Lists (ACLs), Flexible NetFlow, Next-Generation Network-Based Application Recognition (NBAR2), streaming telemetry, and many more services on every port.

Depending on the requirements of each switch in the stack, the Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series Switches provide the flexibility for mixed-mode support between different models in a single stack ring. You can mix switches with different model variants (PoE, data, Multigigabit) and different network modules in the stack; however, it is not possible to mix the9200 and 9200L models due to different stacking bandwidth.