Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series Overview

When in need of a high-performance, highly secure and mobile user experience for enterprise wiring closets in the access and core layers the Cisco Catalyst 4500E is the way to go. Especially developed to cut down the total cost of ownership, the Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series will accelerate business growth and improve efficiency.

The Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series provide borderless performance ideal for collaboration, virtualization, and operational manageability through simplified operations. The main features that stand out are the 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks and the support for Power over Ethernet Plus (PoE+) and Universal PoE (UPOE). The advanced quality of service (QoS) options, predictable performance, and advanced security together with the intelligent network services make the Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series the ideal access layer switch.

Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series Options:

Offering 4 different chassis options you can select either of them. What is unique about these chassis options is the option to scale up to 388 ports because they provide a common switching architecture. Due to the nonstop forwarding with stateful switchover (NSF/SSO) and ISSU, it guarantees continuous packet forwarding and high availability for collaboration applications and VoIP traffic. The four independent chassis options provide from 3 to 10 slots and provide low latency and high performance. The independent versions are Cisco Catalyst WS-C4503-E Chassis, Cisco Catalyst WS C4506-E Chassis, Cisco Catalyst WS C4507R+E Chassis and the most advanced Cisco Catalyst WS C4510R+E Chassis.

 Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series highlights:

• Comprehensive PoE support, including IEEE 802.3af, 802.11n for wireless access points
• Cisco Virtual Switch System (VSS) feature²
• Intelligent services like hardware-based QoS, video delivery, multicast, security, Location Service, and IPv6 option
• Up to 388 ports or up to 34 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports to support multiple concurrent services
• Support for Cisco EnergyWise architecture³
• Hot-swappable components like line cards, power supplies, and fan tray
• Redundancy of all critical components
• Compatibility with classic line cards in the same chassis without degradation in performance
• Simultaneous IPv4/IPv6 deployment or migration optimization

The Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series features flexible interface types and port densities so mixing and matching them is made possible. The port densities options is shown in the table below:

Interconnectivity options of Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series

The Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series provide line cards for numerous LAN access, server connectivity, small and medium-sized business or branch-office deployments. This series provides the option of using SFP, SFP+, RJ45, X2 and GBIC line cards depending on the design requirements of the data center. All of the line cards supported by the Catalyst 4500E series are listed in the table below:

As modern network infrastructures evolve the network management applications are getting more popular and becoming the crucial driver in lowering operating expenditures while improving network availability and simplicity. The Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series Switches offer a superior CLI for detailed engineering configuration and Cisco Prime™ infrastructure⁴ for unified wireless or wired management.

With all these features we can conclude that the Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series provide an optimal solution in the Aggregation layer providing 10GE cost-effective uplinks. Because each Cisco Catalyst 4500E Series uses a single fan tray for cooling, the system has the capability to detect that the fan has failed and the tray needs to be replaced. It will notify the engineers through SNMP, CLI or its LEDs. With its redundancy solutions you can connect two independent switches and manage them as a single unit. This option enormously simplifies the network management and configuration, saving precious time for engineering.