Cisco Systems rolled out more Than 20 new Catalyst switch offerings to address higher levels of security, availability, performance and investment protection.
The additions to the Cisco Catalyst switch portfolio include Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 4500 Series supervisor engines with enhanced security, availability and integrated 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and/or GbE uplinks, as well as the Cisco Catalyst 6500, 3750 and 3560 10/100/1000 Power Over Ethernet (PoE) products. Also announced were high availability (HA) offerings and the industry's first GbE-enabled IP Phone.
Some highlights include:
- the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Supervisor Engine 32, with Policy Feature Card 3B, allows customers to enable hardware based security features, such as DoS mitigation to protect network application performance, and scaleable support for multicast applications at the network edge.
- the new Cisco IOS high availability features include Layer 3 Non-Stop Forwarding with Stateful Switch Over (NSF/SSO) on the Cisco Catalyst 6500 and Layer 2 SSO on the Cisco Catalyst 6500 and Cisco Catalyst 4500 -- enabling sub-second failover capabilities for services such as IP telephony.
- the new Cisco Catalyst 6500 Supervisor Engine 32 is offered with a choice of two 10GbE XENPAK-based or eight one GbE Small Form Factor Pluggable (SFP) based uplinks.
- the Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series gains a new Layer 2/3/4 Supervisor Engine that offers dual wire-speed 10 GbE ports or four GbE ports.
- the new Cisco IP Phone 7971G-GE provides GbE bandwidth to desktops.
