Overview

The Cisco^® Catalyst^® 4500 Series Switches enable Borderless Networks, providing high performance, mobile, and secure user experiences through Layer 2-4 switching investments. They enable security, mobility, application performance, video, and energy savings over an infrastructure that supports resiliency, virtualization, and automation. Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Switches provide borderless performance, scalability, and services with reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) and superior investment protection.

The Cisco Catalyst 4500 (Figure 1) has a centralized forwarding architecture that enables collaboration, virtualization, and operational manageability through simplified operations. With forward and backward compatibility spanning multiple generations, the new Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series provides exceptional investment protection and deployment flexibility to meet the evolving needs of organizations of all sizes. The Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series platform has 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) uplinks and supports Power over Ethernet Plus (PoE+) and Universal PoE (UPOE), enabling customers to future proof their network.

E-Series chassis come in four different form factors: 3-slot (4503-E), 6-slot (4506-E), 7-slot (4507R+E), and 10-slot (4510R+E). 4503-E, 4506-E, 4507R+E, and 4510R+E chassis are extremely flexible and support either 24 or 48 Gbps per line-card slot. Integrated resiliency in the Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series includes 1 + 1 supervisor engine redundancy (10-slot and 7-slot chassis 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 4500E 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 and switching performance independent of provisioning of services such as QoS and security.

Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series Chassis

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