Cisco 4500 Chassis

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series provides scalable, nonblocking Layer 2-4 switching with secure, flexible, nonstop communications, enabling business resilience for enterprises, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and Metro Ethernet customers deploying business-critical applications.

Catalyst 4500 has a centralized forwarding architecture that enables collaboration, virtualization and operational manageablity through simplified operations. With forward and backward compatibility spanning multiple generations, the new Catalyst 4500 E-Series provides exceptional investment protection and deployment flexibility to meet the evolving needs of organizations of all sizes. Catalyst 4500 E-Series platform has 10G uplinks and PoEP support as standard enabling the customers to future proof their network.

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series includes two series of chassis: the Catalyst 4500 E-Series and classic Catalyst 4500 Series chassis. Catalyst 4500 E-Series chassis are extremely flexible and support both 6 Gbps and 24 Gbps per line card slot. The classic Catalyst 4500 Series chassis supports 6 Gbps per line card slot. There are four models of Catalyst 4500 E-Series and classic Catalyst 4500 chassis: 10-slot, 7-slot, 6-slot, and 3-slot. Integrated resiliency in the Catalyst 4500-E and classic Catalyst 4500 Series include 1+1 supervisor engine redundancy (10-slot and 7-slot only), redundant fans, software-based fault tolerance, and 1+1 power supply redundancy. Integrated resiliency in both hardware and software minimizes network downtime, helping to ensure workforce productivity, profitability, and customer success.

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series extends control to the network edge with intelligent network services, including sophisticated quality of service (QoS),, predictable performance, advanced security, comprehensive management, and integrated resiliency. Scalability of these intelligent network services is made possible with dedicated, specialized resources known as ternary content addressable memory (TCAM). Ample TCAM resources (up to 384,000 entries) enable "high feature capacity," which provides wire-speed routing/switching performance independent of provisioning of services such as QoS and security.

Cisco Catalyst 4500 E-Series Chassis

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 E-Series offers four chassis options and eight supervisor engine options (Table 1). It provides a common architecture that can scale up to 388 ports. The Cisco Catalyst WS-C4507R-E and WS-C4510R-E offer high availability by supporting 1+1 redundant supervisor engines with subsecond failover time and full-image In Service Software Upgrades (ISSUs). Non stop forwarding with Stateful Switchover (NSF/SSO) and ISSU ensure continuous packet forwarding during Supervisor engine switchover to ensure high availability for collaboration applications and VoIP. Using the same line cards as the widely deployed Catalyst 4000 Series Switches and classic Catalyst 4500 Series Switches, the Catalyst 4500-E Series furthers Cisco's commitment to affordable enterprise and branch scalability.